"Drinking Til It Does" is country songwriting at its most classic in terms of what it is doing emotionally: the attempt to use a substance to process something that requires actual processing. Wallen has written around this theme before, and it is not a romanticization. It is a recognition of how people actually behave, described with the specificity that makes it feel true rather than performed. The track sits in the sequence of I'm the Problem as one of the harder-hitting emotional moments, not the loudest, but one of the most direct. The production does not over-insulate the writing from the listener. There is a roughness to the arrangement that keeps it honest. Country has always had this relationship to drinking as both a coping mechanism and a narrative device, and the best songs in that tradition understand the difference between explaining a behavior and endorsing it. "Drinking Til It Does" knows the difference.
Morgan Wallen