Morgan Wallen’s ‘I Got Better’: How a Hot Breakfast Fed a Hot Hit

The best revenge, it’s been said, is a life well-lived.

That doesn’t mean twisting the knife is completely out of bounds. Morgan Wallen’s new single, “I Got Better,” is an ideal example. The protagonist reclaims his personality, reestablishes broken friendships, then suggests his improvement is all a result of his ex’s departure: “I got better since you got gone.” But interpretations of “I Got Better” are not limited to that surface storyline; there’s something deeper at work.

“The girl could be anything to me,” Wallen says. “It wasn’t necessarily a relationship with another human. It could have been a relationship with anything in your life that was holding you back, and the only thing that you did was eliminate that, and everything became clearer in your life.”

That therapy session of a song came from a breakfast songwriting session, conducted at Wallen’s farmhouse around the end of last year.

There were plenty of contributors at the table: Blake Pendergrass (“Heart of Stone,” “Just in Case”), HARDY, ERNEST, Charlie Handsome (“Last Night,” “Downtown’s Dead”) and Chase McGill (“Happen to Me,” “Straight Line”). And Wallen handled the cooking himself.

“He’s a big cast-iron skillet guy,” Pendergrass says. “Especially out in the country, it just gives it that great flavor.”

Food wasn’t the only thing on the menu. The group chat turned toward religion, and they specifically debated how extensive the flooding was in the Old Testament tale of Noah’s ark.

“ERNEST was going off of that conversation,” Pendergrass remembers. “He just sang that melody, like, ‘The world got bigger since the Bible got wrote.’ ”

That clicked with the crew, and in short order, they revised the words over that same melody to “I got better since you got gone.” Meanwhile, Handsome shuffled through his trove of track ideas and came across something he’d started with Joe Reeves (“Broadway Girls”), based primarily around chugging arpeggios on electric guitar. It was unusual for a country song — all major sevenths and minor chords; not a single major triad, according to ultimate-guitar.com.

“That’s not the music I would play at all,” McGill notes. “But Charlie does that perfectly wrong in all the right ways.”

That’s apropos, given that the song’s protagonist was flipping all the wrongs in his life to right. Wallen insisted on painting that picture simply, which actually makes the story all the more dramatic.

“We went through all kinds of different ways to write it, and in my mind, the song needed to be a certain way, and everyone else kind of had a different idea about it,” he says. “I was adamant that I wanted it to be where the guy literally didn’t change anything in his life other than the girl was gone.”

With that decided, the opening verse recounted a few regular activities that would seem fairly typical for a good ol’ boy: deer hunting, sports, Fridays at the bar. They used the title twice in that verse, then HARDY took charge of the chorus melody, bumping it up just a hair higher as the singer celebrates how his world has turned: “I’m finally back to being who I am,” he proclaims, arguably offering the most important observation in the second line of that chorus.

“That’s kind of the idea of life, right?” McGill says. “I mean, everybody just kind of wants to be who they are and accepted and loved for it.”

The second verse moves the focus from the guy’s current normalcy to the ex-girlfriend’s classic bad-relationship behavior, recounting how she’d separated him emotionally from his friends and family.
Not every song needs a bridge, but when they built one for “I Got Better,” they took the therapy part to its maximum conclusion, matching his rejuvenation to her departure in a passive-aggressive way.

“‘I ain’t saying you’re the weight on my back, but it’s not there anymore’ — it’s kind of just a funny way of saying everything without saying it,” Pendergrass explains. “I think it’s just a great summary. That was the goal, at least.”

Handsome rode herd on the demo, which featured the relentless electric guitar arpeggios that had started them off musically, plus some percussion and not much else. Because not much else was needed. The musicians picked up the essentials from the first play of the demo when they recorded “I Got Better” in early 2025 at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios.

“It was classic Charlie,” says producer Joey Moi (Florida Georgia Line, Nickelback). “He writes just one fucking lethal part. We were like, ‘Oh, my god. OK, now we know where the song is going to go.’ ”

Dave Cohen played simple keyboard lines that thickened the sound and emphasized the unusual chord structure. Guitarist Tom Bukovac composed a flowing instrumental riff to open the performance, creating a little extra sweetness that helps hide the passive-aggressive venom. “It probably is a Duesenberg or some guitar of that ilk,” Moi says. “It’s got the tone knob rolled right back so it sounds like it’s kind of muffled and round, and it’s doubled and harmonized. That’s it.”

Bukovac also developed a simple, descending passage that became a hooky, recurring theme: five quarter notes beginning in the last bar of every eight-bar section. They tested playing it every four bars, but decided that was too much. It’s an essential part of “I Got Better.”

“Anytime there’s a demo, if it doesn’t have something happening on the eighth bar, you always try and add something to it to make it unique or [provide] some kind of dismount into the next section,” Moi says. “He always knows that eventually I’m probably going to ask for something there.”

Wallen delivered the vocal with a subtle shudder on some of the longer notes, hinting at anger and sadness even as the character tries to keep his attention on the life-changing transition that the lyrics represent.

“There is something beautiful about music in that you don’t always have to go to exact feelings or scenarios,” Wallen says. “A good song has a way of bringing out those feelings in you that may not be at the forefront. There is anger, there is sadness, there is disdain, there’s a lot of things in that song that make you just feel. Of course, I have some of those experiences in my life that I could [draw from], but something about a good song just harkens that within you and it makes it easier to bring out.”

Fans definitely felt it after Wallen included it on his album I’m the Problem. “It was obvious in the consumption that it was reacting really well,” Moi says. “The audience was finding it and repeating it over and over.”

Mercury/Republic/Big Loud released it to country radio through PlayMPE on June 16. It’s already at No. 25 on Billboard’s Country Airplay list dated July 26 in its fourth charted week. It ranks at No. 5 on Hot Country Songs. “It is one of my most personal songs on the entire record,” Wallen says, “and it’s a song that a lot of fans are relating to.”

Whether they think of it as a song about giving up a relationship, a bad habit or something else, a life improvement is always worth celebrating.