Kip Moore Scores First No. 1

"Somethin' 'Bout a Truck" was certified gold for reaching sales of 500,000 before the April 24 release of his debut album, Up All Night. The song's video has received more than 7 million views online.

"I was in Rome, Georgia, and my manager called me and told me," says Moore of how he learned of his first No. 1 hit. "I was speechless. I still can't wrap my head around this whole thing. I have dreamed about it for a long time, so it's going to take awhile to understand what is happening. But I definitely had a moment where I told my producer, Brett James, that I felt like Rocky Balboa in Rocky II when he holds the belt up. Instead of saying, 'Yo, Adrian,' I said, 'Yo, Brett, we did it!'"

Moore wrote or co-wrote every song on his debut album. "It means everything to me as a writer," he says of the No. 1 hit. "It's validation that all of the years that you kept telling yourself to stick to your guns and stick to what you know, that you are on the right path and doing the right thing and doing what you are supposed to do. People called me crazy at first because we wrote four verses before we get to the chorus, but I stuck to my guns and said, 'This is how I am supposed to write this song.' For this to go number one and the American public to fall in love with this song, that is validation for how I like to write, and that is with no boundaries.

"It is impossible to thank all of the people who are responsible for this because it is definitely not all me," he says. "I want to thank all of the people at the label, and also everybody who has played a role in my career, from the people who book my travel to the journalists who wrote about the song. I'm so thankful to country radio for changing my life. There are so many people that had a part in this. It isn't just my number one; it is so many people's number one, those people who never stopped believing in me as an artist."