How Rodney Atkins’ Full-Circle Duet With His Son Came to Be

Back in the mid-2000s, Rodney Atkins‘ young son Elijah got chastised at preschool for singing the lyrics — including the H-E-double-hockey-sticks — to his dad’s country hit, “If You’re Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows).”

That experience inspired Atkins to write “Watching You,” a song about all the ways a young boy emulates his father’s behavior, both funny and serious.

“Watching You” was another big country hit for Atkins, and even hit the No. 1 spot on Billboard‘s year-end Country Songs chart in 2006.

Now, almost 20 years later, Atkins is revisiting “Watching You” — this time, as a duet with the son who inspired it. Now 23-year-old Elijah sings the chorus on the new version, “Watching You 2.0.”

“I don’t know if anybody’s ever done this before,” Atkins says in a new interview with Taste of Country. “A song that was a hit and was written about someone, and 20 years later, you do it as a duet with the person you wrote the song about. It’s just a sweet story.”

Read More: 26 Country Songs Inspired by An Artist’s Child

Elijah had no professional experience before working on the song, though he’d started “dabbling” in writing and recording his own music in recent years. Atkins says that the idea to redo “Watching You” started off as a Father’s Day TikTok video in 2024, at the suggestion of another member of their family.

“That’d be my wife,” he says, speaking of fellow singer-songwriter Rose Falcon, who is Elijah’s stepmom. (Elijah was born from Atkins’ marriage his ex-wife Tammy Jo; he and Rose welcomed two more sons in in 2017 and 2019).

Rose started pushing Atkins to do something with “Watching You” for Father’s Day — and she said that he should involve Elijah.

“She bribed him with a lot of chicken casserole and sweet talk and got him to sing the chorus,” he jokes, “and that instantly blew up. She was like, ‘You guys gotta do the whole version.'”

They released “Watching You 2.0” in late May 2025, and immediately, Elijah got what Atkins jokingly calls a “baptism of fire” in terms of playing the song live. They performed it together first at the Ryman, then at Nissan Stadium during CMA Fest.

But the singer says his son was a natural. He might have been nervous at first, but he quickly acclimated to the stage and the studio — the latter, he points out, was something Elijah had started getting used to as he experimented with his own studio equipment at home.

“It was just kind of like, ‘Wow, this is really happening right now,’ through the whole process,” Atkins says of his perspective on recording with his son.

“And then when we got into mixing, he just — he has good ideas,” the singer continued. “He suggested a few things we did. He came up with the background answers and stuff…there’s a moving steel part in the intro? That was him.”

Even though Elijah was green as a country music performer, he had a long history with his dad’s music. Atkins says his son has always had an ear for good songs, and that he even picked his 2011 hit “Take a Back Road” to be a single.

Specifically, Elijah has had a connection to “Watching You” his whole life. He was in the original music video as a young boy, and throughout his childhood, fans have known him as the inspiration for the song. That connection even made Elijah roll his eyes a little as a teen.

“‘Oh, you’re the chicken nugget kid. You’re the little buckaroo,'” Atkins says, referencing the comments Elijah often gets when he meets fans.

“And he makes a joke out of it,” he continues. “He’d say, ‘My claim to fame is dropping cuss words and throwing chicken nuggets, and nothing’s changed. I’m still doing the same thing.’ He just learned to roll with it.”