Tim McGraw‘s “Standing Room Only” is out now. The song, which is the debut single from a forthcoming new project, hit McGraw the first time he heard it, especially with the message behind the lyrics.

“This is one of those songs that, from the very beginning, we felt like it was a special song,” McGraw tells Audacy’s Rob + Holly. The last thing you want to do when you get a great song like this is go into the studio and screw it up. So every step along the way, it went the way we wanted it to go, and the record came out sounding like I wanted it to sound. It turned out better than I ever could have imagined. When we played back the final mix, it just jumped off of the console. We felt like it was something special.”

As a self-described “song nut,” McGraw knew right away that “Standing Room Only” was something he wanted to record, and very unique.

“I listen to songs all the time,” McGraw shares with his record label. “I listen to new songs every day from songwriters, and when I heard this song, the lyrics hit me right away. I mean, it’s just so well written. There’s not a wasted line anywhere in this song. And the melody of it, it was a little different.”

McGraw just shot the video for “Standing Room Only,” which he is eager to share with the rest of the world.

“The video’s going to be really cool,” the 55-year-old hints. “I can’t wait to see some of the footage. We just shot it a couple of days ago, and I think it’s going to be really cool. It’s  very metaphoric in a lot of ways, about life and shedding some of the ghosts of the past, and looking forward to the future.”

McGraw enjoys making videos because it taps into one of his other talents: acting, something he hopes to do more of in the next few years.

“There’s a few floating around,” teases the singer, speaking of other opportunities. “We’ve got to narrow it down to the ones we like the best. The timing is always the key part, is finding time to do it. That was the great thing about 1883, is we started during COVID, so there really wasn’t a lot else we could do, so we had time to do it. But there’s some really cool projects I’m excited about.”

Find “Standing Room Only” and all of McGraw’s music at TimMcGraw.com.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of BMLG / Robby Klein