The 2010s File Feature
This Is It
Scotty McCreery's "This Is It": A Comeback and a Country Chart Victory Scotty McCreery's "This Is It" represented something unusual in contemporary country m…
01 The Story
Scotty McCreery's "This Is It": A Comeback and a Country Chart Victory
Scotty McCreery's "This Is It" represented something unusual in contemporary country music: a genuine commercial comeback built not on a genre crossover or a stylistic reinvention but on a return to the kind of earnest, melodically direct storytelling that had made McCreery a star in the first place. The song arrived at the end of 2018, a period when McCreery had navigated significant career turbulence including the loss of his record label deal, serious health concerns, and a high-profile proposal to his longtime girlfriend that he documented publicly. "This Is It" wove all of these personal threads into a single, carefully crafted declaration of commitment and gratitude.
The song was released on October 5, 2018, as the lead single from McCreery's album Five More Minutes, which was itself released on April 6, 2018. The album had been self-released through Triple Tigers Records, a Nashville independent label, after McCreery's departure from Mercury Nashville. That independent release context gave "This Is It" an underdog narrative that resonated with his fan base and with the country music community more broadly, demonstrating that he had maintained his commitment to making music despite the institutional challenges that had confronted him.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "This Is It" debuted at number 96 during the chart week of December 22, 2018, climbed steadily through early 2019, and reached its peak position of 42 during the week of February 16, 2019. The track spent a total of 20 weeks on the chart. On the Billboard Country Airplay chart, the song had an even more dramatic trajectory, reaching number one in March 2019, becoming McCreery's first number-one country airplay single since his 2011 debut single "I Love You This Big." This country chart success was the more commercially significant achievement in the context of McCreery's core market and the industry recognition it generated.
The production of "This Is It" was handled by Frank Rogers, who had worked extensively with McCreery throughout his career. Rogers brought a production approach rooted in traditional country instrumentation, emphasizing acoustic guitar, steel guitar, and live drums in a sonic palette that felt deliberately classic by 2018 pop-country standards. This production choice aligned with McCreery's consistent positioning as an artist whose work drew more from traditional country's roots than from the bro-country or pop-country hybrids that had dominated the Nashville commercial mainstream in the preceding decade.
Scotty McCreery had won American Idol Season 10 in 2011 at the age of seventeen, becoming one of the youngest winners in the show's history and the first country artist to win since Carrie Underwood in 2005. His debut single "I Love You This Big" reached number one on the Country Airplay chart, and his debut album Clear as Day debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making him one of the most commercially successful American Idol alumni in the show's history. The subsequent years had been productive but less dramatically successful, with McCreery releasing albums through Mercury Nashville while navigating the transition from teenage phenomenon to adult recording artist.
The personal events that informed "This Is It" were unusually well-documented because McCreery had maintained a public presence throughout them. His proposal to Gabi Dugal, his high school sweetheart, was recorded and published online, generating widespread attention. His diagnosis with a torn labrum that required surgery was also publicly discussed. And his departure from Mercury Nashville, while professionally painful, was communicated with transparency about the business realities of the major-label system. This public documentation of personal and professional challenges created a context for "This Is It" in which the song's declaration of gratitude and commitment had a specific biographical referent that listeners could access.
The wedding song dimension of "This Is It" gave it a specific functional use that extended its commercial life well beyond the initial chart campaign. Wedding playlists on streaming platforms incorporated the track, and it became a popular choice for ceremonies and receptions throughout 2019 and into subsequent years. This functional adoption created a secondary audience and streaming base that supplemented the core country radio and McCreery fan base, contributing to the song's accumulated 88 million YouTube views.
McCreery's vocal approach on "This Is It" demonstrated the maturation of an artist who had been performing professionally since age seventeen. The teenage voice that had captivated American Idol audiences had deepened into a baritone instrument of considerable warmth and authority, and McCreery's ability to deploy that instrument in service of emotionally specific material, rather than merely showcasing its range or power, reflected the development of his artistic judgment over nearly a decade of professional experience.
The album Five More Minutes, which "This Is It" came to represent commercially, was also notable for its title track, which addressed McCreery's grief over the death of his grandfather. That song's emotional weight established the album's thematic framework of loss, love, and the value of time spent with people who matter, and "This Is It" functioned within that framework as the affirmative counterpart to the elegiac title track, completing the emotional arc of the project.
McCreery's Industry Path and Independent Success
The success of "This Is It" on both the Hot 100 and the Country Airplay chart carried particular significance as a demonstration of what independent country artists could achieve in the streaming era. Triple Tigers Records, a Nashville independent founded in 2012, had built a roster of artists who achieved mainstream country radio success without the infrastructure of major-label support, and McCreery's chart performance with "This Is It" was one of the label's most high-profile demonstrations of this model. His journey from major-label artist to independent success became a frequently cited example in industry discussions about the changing economics of country music distribution and promotion in the years following the track's release.
02 Song Meaning
Commitment, Gratitude, and the Weight of Ordinary Devotion: The Meaning of "This Is It"
"This Is It" belongs to the tradition of country music's most durable thematic territory, the declaration of romantic commitment, but it approaches that territory from an angle that distinguishes it from the more conventional love song format. Rather than describing the intensity of new romantic feeling or the drama of courtship and pursuit, the song is addressed to a relationship that already exists, one that has been tested by time, by difficulty, and by the ordinary accumulation of shared experience. The "this is it" of the title is not a declaration of arrival at the beginning of something, but a recognition of what has been present all along, seen more clearly now through the lens of everything that has intervened.
The biographical context that McCreery's audience brought to the song shaped its reception significantly. Listeners who knew about the proposal to Gabi Dugal, the health challenges McCreery had faced, and the professional turbulence of the period leading up to the song's creation heard "This Is It" as a direct statement from a specific person to a specific person about experiences they had navigated together. This biographical anchoring gave the song's declaration of commitment a weight and specificity that more generic love songs, written to apply to as broad an audience as possible, often lack.
The song's thematic emphasis on gratitude is one of its most distinctive qualities. Where many declaration-of-love songs focus on the singer's feelings toward the beloved, "This Is It" registers as much a sense of thankfulness as passion, the kind of gratitude that develops when someone has been present through genuinely difficult circumstances. This emphasis on gratitude over desire reframes the romantic relationship as a form of partnership that has been proven by experience rather than merely declared in the abstract, giving the commitment carried in the title a foundation in accumulated evidence rather than emotional intensity alone.
The traditional country production that surrounds McCreery's vocal performance contributes to the song's thematic project in meaningful ways. The acoustic guitar, steel guitar, and live drum arrangement situates "This Is It" within a sonic tradition that connotes authenticity, unpretentiousness, and a relationship with the ordinary textures of working life that resonates with country music's core audience. This production context communicates that the declaration of commitment being made in the song comes from a specific cultural place, one that values permanence, loyalty, and the kind of love that is expressed through action and presence rather than grand gesture.
The wedding song reception that "This Is It" found in the years following its release is one indicator of how its thematic content was understood by audiences. Songs that function effectively as wedding music tend to share certain qualities: they describe love as a destination rather than a journey, they emphasize permanence over passion, and they imagine the relationship being described as exemplary, a model that others can recognize and aspire to. "This Is It" meets all of these criteria while avoiding the generic sentimentality that makes many intentionally written "wedding songs" feel hollow. Its effectiveness in that context comes precisely from its specificity, its connection to real events and real emotions that audiences can sense even without knowing the biographical details.
McCreery's vocal performance on "This Is It" carries its own layer of meaning in the context of his career trajectory. His voice, which had been the primary instrument of his appeal since his American Idol emergence, had developed significantly between 2011 and 2018, deepening and gaining the kind of tonal complexity that allows a singer to communicate emotional nuance without resorting to melodic gymnastics. The restraint of his delivery on "This Is It" is itself meaningful, demonstrating a confidence in the material and in the audience's capacity to be moved by understatement that distinguishes mature recorded art from the demonstration-of-capability approach that characterizes much commercial country singing.
The song's cultural position within McCreery's body of work as the track that restored his commercial momentum after a difficult period also gives it a meta-significance that listeners aware of his career arc can appreciate. "This Is It" is simultaneously about a romantic relationship and about a career, about the moment when someone who has navigated significant challenges arrives at a place of clarity and commitment that the preceding difficulties have made more, not less, certain. This double meaning gives the song a resonance that extends beyond its immediate narrative to speak to anyone who has had to work toward a destination that was not guaranteed from the beginning.
→ More from the 2010s File
View all 2010s hits →
Keep digging