Chris DuBois had already written down the song title when he got together with Chris Janson for a songwriting session. He suggested "Buy Me a Boat" as a potential hook, then the song virtually wrote itself.

Janson told The Boot: "We just sat down to write something that was fun, that we both felt was cool, and we both had Yeti coolers outside in our trucks. I'm sort of an outdoorsy, hunter-fisher guy, and he is, too. Everything just sort of naturally fit: The Powerball lotto, everybody's doing that. We just picked little things from life and put it in a song. The 'redneck, white trash, blue collar' stuff, that's really true to life for me. That's exactly how I grew up, so it's a real biopic song for me."