A couple of decades have passed since Brad Paisley, 51, first wooed a woman with the pickup line, “Girl, I can hardly wait to get a little mud on the tires” in his 2003 hit, “Mud on the Tires.” On his new song “Truck Still Works,” that girl is back in town and, as luck would have it, he still has his ’03 Chevy short-bed pickup.

“I didn’t know she was back in town,” he sings on the new song, which he debuted at the People’s Choice Country Awards on Thursday. “Seemed like it been forever/She said it’s good to be back home/But you know what would make it better?” You don’t have to guess too hard. As Paisley suggests, “Let’s see if that truck still works.”

Paisley wrote the song’s lyrics with four other songwriters: Will Bundy, Rodney Clawson, Chris Dubois, and Hunter Phelps. Incidentally, he wrote “Mud on the Tires” with only Dubois.

“‘Truck Still Works’ is a track where everything old is new again,” Paisley said in a statement. “We debated on how much to really allude to the original (‘Mud on the Tires’) and there were questions like ‘Do you moonlight in a duck blind, catfish on a trot line?’ What do you not put in, what’s too much, what is enough and what is not enough? And trust me, we tried each of those and it was really fun.

“I think it was Chris Dubois’ idea to end the first verse with the line, ‘How about a little test drive down by the lake,’” he continued. “It was really fun to go through the process of what makes this song both new and old. What I love about it is that the groove, the feel, is all very modern and very country. We hope it’s a blast for anyone who’s a current fan or for someone to become a new fan.”

The song arrives close to a year since Paisley released “Son of the Mountains” and “The Medicine Will,” two other songs that are expected to appear on his complete Son of the Mountains album. “The Medicine Will” was a particularly heavy song for Paisley, who addressed the opioid epidemic devastating his home state of West Virginia and surrounding Appalachia.

Paisley blasted the pharmaceutical companies who flooded communities with prescription drugs like Oxycontin in a 2024 interview with RS. “There are people who made billions of dollars on the death and suffering of people like my home state,” he said.