About The Song
“It Won’t Hurt” arrived in late 1986 as the third single from Dwight Yoakam’s breakthrough debut, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. Written by Yoakam and produced by Pete Anderson for Reprise Records, the track distilled his Bakersfield-by-way-of-L.A. aesthetic into three lean minutes: dry drums, twanging Telecasters, and a vocal that sounds like plain talk sharpened into melody. On the original Reprise LP, it’s sequenced early—right after “Honky Tonk Man”—signaling that Yoakam could do hard-twanging honky-tonk without leaning on covers or nostalgia.
The song’s origin actually reaches back before the major-label album. “It Won’t Hurt” first appeared on Yoakam’s indie Oak Records EP in 1984 and was carried forward—re-cut with Anderson and an A-team of West Coast pickers—for the 1986 Reprise edition of the album. That continuity explains why it feels fully formed: the writing bears the tight economy of a road-tested barroom lament, while the arrangement leaves air around each instrument so the lyric can land.
Lyrically, it’s a classic “hurtin’ and drinkin’” confession told with a wink of denial. The narrator claims the whiskey will numb the fall “from this barstool,” swearing the pain won’t register. The lines are conversational and unsentimental, which is why the chorus sticks—you can imagine the words spoken across a sticky table at closing time. Critics at the time heard the same thing: a stone-country heart set to dance-floor time, sold with unforced conviction.
On tape, Anderson keeps the palette bone-lean: chattering rhythm guitars, a touch of fiddle/steel color, and a rhythm section that snaps instead of swells. Yoakam’s nasal-warm tenor rides just ahead of the beat, a phrasing quirk that turns simple lines into a hook. Nothing here chases pop sheen; the sound aims for jukebox presence and car-radio punch, the very blend that made his debut feel like a reset button for commercial country in 1986.
The single made a respectable chart run in the United States—Yoakam’s first two singles had already gone Top Five—and this one pushed into the Top 40 on the country survey. North of the border it did even better, reaching the Canadian country Top 10. That transnational response echoed the album’s broader momentum: Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. would become a career-making calling card, earning Grammy attention and introducing Yoakam as a standard-bearer for hard country in the MTV era.
Physically, the U.S. 7-inch paired “It Won’t Hurt” with “Bury Me” (a duet with Maria McKee) on the flip, a coupling that highlighted two sides of the album’s personality: barroom stoicism up front, West-coast country harmony on the back. The song also slips into Yoakam’s visual universe; you can hear it tagged onto the outro of the “Honky Tonk Man” video, a little hat-tip to how tightly the early singles were interwoven on radio and TV.
The track has kept a long afterlife. It reappears in remastered form on later reissues and box sets and still surfaces in set lists when Yoakam wants to pivot from high-energy shuffles to a tight, hard-country slow burn. Heard today, the record remains a tidy lesson in craft: small band, big feeling, no wasted motion. Say the thing, mean it, and let the guitars drawl the rest.
Video
Lyric
Chorus:
It won’t hurt when i fall down from this bar stool
And it won’t hurt when i stumble in the street
It won’t hurt ’cause this whiskey eases misery
But even whiskey cannot ease your hurting meToday i had another bout with sorrow
You know this time i almost won
If this bottle would just hold out ’til tomorrow
I know that i’d have sorrow on the runChorus:
It won’t hurt when i fall down from this bar stool
And it won’t hurt when i stumble in the street
It won’t hurt ’cause this whiskey eases misery
But even whiskey cannot ease your hurting meYour memory comes back up with each sunrise
I reach out for the bottle and find it’s gone
Yeah, lord, somewhere every night the whiskey leave me
To face this cold, cold world on my ownChorus:
It won’t hurt when i fall down from this bar stool
And it won’t hurt when i stumble in the street
It won’t hurt ’cause this whiskey eases misery
But even whiskey cannot ease your hurting me