Twenty-six years ago today, on Oct. 28, 1995, David Lee Murphy might have dusted off a bottle of champagne to toast to his success. It was on that date that Murphy’s single “Dust on the Bottle” shot straight to No. 1.
“Dust on the Bottle,” written by Murphy, was from the singer’s 1994 freshman album, Out With a Bang. ”I had the idea for that song, but I hadn’t ever done anything with it,” Murphy tells The Boot of how the song came to be.
“I just remember being at my house the second day [of recording]. We started recording on Monday, and Tuesday morning, I was drinking coffee at my kitchen table. I started playing the opening chords on my guitar for “Dust on the Bottle,”” he recalls. “It just came out of nowhere. The song just fell out in like 15 minutes.
“I called Tony Brown, who was producing my record, and I told him, ‘Man, I just wrote this new song!'” Murphy continues. “We had all the songs picked out already for the album. He told me to bring it in and play it for him that day. When he heard the song, he said, ‘Man, we’ve got to cut this.’ So we cut it, and what’s on the record is the first take of the song. A lot of the vocals on it were the first time I sang it. It was really a special song, and it still is to this day.”
“Dust on the Bottle” was Murphy’s fourth single from Out With a Bang. The song stayed at the top of the charts for two weeks and remains one of Murphy’s most-successful singles to date, along with his 2018 collaboration with Kenny Chesney, “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.”