Story Behind The Song

This song started at 4 in the morning -- which is exactly where it says it started. There's a particular quality to being awake at that hour in a city when you're not supposed to be a city person. Everything that makes sense in daylight starts to feel like a negotiation you didn't fully read before signing. The lyric grew out of that specific discomfort -- not despair, not crisis, just the slow accumulation of a life that's practical and reasonable and somehow still wrong. The hundred-square-foot garden is real. The jars are real. The two weeks a year where you remember who you are -- and then the Monday morning when you don't -- that's real too. The chorus came from trying to find language for something that usually gets dressed up in more polished terms. "Wake up dead and go to bed tired" is what it actually feels like -- not poetically, just accurately. The ten-year plan is both the hope and the trap. The land that disappeared is literal and it isn't. The waltz feel wasn't a production decision so much as an emotional one. There's something about 3/4 time -- that slight lurch, the way it keeps circling back -- that mirrors the feeling of the song itself. You keep coming around to the same place. You're not stuck, exactly. You're just still there. The outro was the last thing written and the first thing that felt completely true. After all that reaching, all that chorus, all that anthem -- it's still 4:23 and he's just trying to sleep. That felt like the most honest place to leave it.

Song Description

"4:23" is a modern country ballad waltz at 70bpm, written for mature male vocal with fiddle and piano at its core. The song follows a man awake before dawn in the city -- restless, rootless, and quietly suffocating under fluorescent lights and a mortgage that makes sense on paper. His wife tends a hundred-square-foot garden. He fixes problems that don't feel real. Together they're putting in years -- counting them down like a sentence -- hoping to buy back the kind of land and life that slipped away before they knew what they had. The chorus is anthemic and blunt: waking up dead, going to bed tired, ten more years before there's any daylight. It doesn't offer false comfort or a Hollywood resolution. It offers solidarity -- the kind that comes from a song that names the thing you haven't been able to say out loud. The pre-chorus in the second verse lands the song's emotional gut-punch: "Nothin' much grows up here and I'm feelin' it now" -- a line that works literally, physically, and spiritually all at once. The structure earns its three choruses. Each pass deepens the exhaustion without tipping into despair. The solo break creates space to breathe before the final push. And the outro strips everything back to its simplest truth: it's 4:23, and he's just trying to sleep. That restraint is what makes it hit. Sonically and thematically at home alongside Chris Stapleton, Cody Johnson, Tyler Childers, and Zach Bryan. Suited for sync opportunities involving rural identity, working-class perseverance, late-night emotional reckoning, and the American tension between aspiration and displacement.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
It's 4:23 I'm up with the clock
The city keeps hummin' that tickin' won't stop.
My feet keep on itchin' they're huntin' for ground
Only houses and paved roads for miles around.

[Verse 2]
Her garden fits in a hundred square feet
We keep puttin' up jars of all that we need.
It ain't thousands of acres ridin' John Deere green
Just a small patch of dirt and a handful of seeds.

[Pre-Chorus]
I ain't ungrateful for all that we've got
But it keeps on reminding me what I am not.

[Chorus]
When I wake up dead and go to bed tired
And put in my time tryin' not to get fired.
Gonna park it right here for ten more long years
Then try to buy back the land that disappeared.
Workin' our way back to where we were free
Takes more than some hope and dusty old dreams, at 4:23

[Verse 3]
I'm tired of fixin' when problems ain't real
And my hands seem to forget how honest work feels.
For two weeks a year I remember my name
Then I'm back in the city pick'n back up again.

[Pre-Chorus]
Back to the grind forty yards off the ground.
Nothin' much grows up here and I'm feelin' it now.

[Pause]

[Chorus]
Wakin' up dead and goin' to bed tired
And put in my time tryin' not to get fired.
Gonna park it right here for ten more long years
Then try to buy back the land that disappeared.
Workin' our way back to where we were free
Takes more than some hope and dusty old dreams.

[Solo Break]

[Chorus]
Where I wake up dead and go to bed tired
And put in my time tryin' not to get fired.
Gonna park it right here for ten more long years
Then try to buy back the land that disappeared.
Workin' our way back to where we were free
Takes more than some hope and dusty old dreams, at 4:23

[Outro]
But right now I'm just tryin' to sleep
And it's 4:23