Songfacts®:

• Backed by only an acoustic guitar, Aloe Blacc sings to families of those who lost their lives in recent violence. The titular subject of the song is the father of African American teenager Michael Brown who was shot by a white police officer in 2014.
• Blacc recorded the song ten days after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. "I was inspired and moved to write a memorial to the Brown family. But so many more deaths had occurred that I just felt compelled to expand the memorial to more families of victims of violence," he told NPR. "I chose the specific families because those were victims that were spoken about on television and in the media most widely, and I wanted to humanize the victims, to humanize the situation in such a way that didn't discuss the protests and it didn't discuss police brutality, but simply discussed the real human emotion around losing someone, so that everybody could connect through what these families are feeling."