Interview: The Meaning Behind Thompson Square’s Romantic “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not”

When Thompson Square reached the top of the country charts with “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not” David Lee Murphy knew that he had written a hit. But it wasn’t until he had a crowd of bikers singing the lyrics along with him that he realized he’d written a song that stood the test of time.

In 2010, Murphy teamed up with Jim Collins to pen the romantic track that would become the signature hit of the duo Shawna and Keifer Thompson. The song tells the sweet story of a couple whose romance begins with a rooftop kiss, as implied by the title. That fateful kiss later turns into a marriage.

It became the husband and wife duo’s first No. 1 hit and reached No. 32 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also earned them two Grammy nominations for Best Country Song and Best Country Duo/Group Performance. Below, Murphy tells American Songwriter about the origins of “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not.”

Meaning Behind the Song

Jim Collins and I wrote that. Jim and I also wrote “Big Green Tractor,” so we’ve been really fortunate together. One thing I like about Jim is there’s certain things that I say that he doesn’t say. I saw a girl on a TV show and she was talking to her boyfriend. She looked at the guy and she said, “Are you gonna kiss me or not?” and I had that written down. I had a little way of playing it with the backward chord progression, it’s got a little weird, different thing to it. There’s a bunch of great lines in there and a lot of the lines Jim came up with were just perfect for that song.

We spent a couple of times working on that song and we really liked it, but we didn’t demo it for a long time. Then an engineer friend of mine had a session booked and the guys that were recording at the session got sick or something they couldn’t do the session. They called me up and said, “I got a session, you got anything that you could cut?” And I said, “Let me dig around and see if I got anything to cut,” and then I remembered, “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not.”

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I called up Jim and said, “You want to go demo this song?” And he goes, “Yeah, let’s do it.” So when we cut it, Doug, my manager, played it to the guys that were producing Thompson Square and they said, “We love this song, can we have it?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure,” and they put it out. The song went all the way from the end of the summer up through Christmas and it was going real slow. They were getting good response on the song. Then right after Christmas, somehow it just took off and it started going crazy. It ended up being a great song. We got nominated for a Grammy and they got nominated for a Grammy and that was really cool.

We played this show for this Harley-Davidson dealership in North Carolina back in the early summer. You get a parking lot full of old bikers singing “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not,” that was pretty fun…I thought Thompson Square nailed that.

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