Songfacts®:

• While Phil Labonte was working on this song at home, his marine then-wife was risking her life on the Middle East front lines. This song was inspired by the singer's feelings of helplessness as he waited for news of his spouse.
  
  "Rivercity stands for 'reduced communications,'" he explained. "Me and my ex would be on the phone and she'd be like, 'Yo, the base is getting mortared. I gotta go.' If someone dies, they shut off communications until they can notify the families of the people that die. So we'd be talking and she would say, 'Hey, we're going to rivercity' and hang up, and I wouldn't talk to her for three or four days and I wouldn't know what happened. The base is getting mortared. She might have taken a round or died. Being on the other end of that is agonizing."