Songfacts®:

• The Court Yard Hounds album spans sounds of folk, country, rock and Americana, and on this song about an angry, disapproving father, the sisters rock out. The Boot asked Martie Maguire if was there any concern about the genre that the music would fit into. She replied: "Not really, because Emily was doing her own demos and she would give the songs to me and they were basically complete. Some of them were guitar-vocal, but some of them had a dobro part or had a garage-band drum loop, just to kind of get her idea across. So it was all in her head, and when I got them it was actually hard to add a full band to them because I was so married to the demos. Emily doesn't really write with a genre in mind, she writes with an idea or a melody, and that drives it. I'm the same kind of songwriter. [I don't say] 'I'm gonna sit down and write a rock song' or 'I'm gonna sit down a write a country song.' We have a bluegrass background and that tends to seep into things, the kind of acoustic nature of things [on songs like] 'Ain't No Son' and 'The Coast,' the very dry acoustic sound comes from our love of liking the natural sound of instruments. It's not a very affected sound. That sometimes can lean more country or more acoustic, but ... when we put an electric guitar in there, that would take it in a rock direction. I think Rolling Stone called it 'folk-rock,' which I thought was an interesting categorization."
• Lyrically the song is an angry argument between a father and a son who's revealed he is gay. Robison was originally inspired to write the song after watching a documentary on children coming out.
  
  Maguire told the Australian newspaper Star Observer: "We wrote it after Emily had watched a documentary about families who throw their young boys out of the house when they find out they're gay. She was really disturbed by that mentality. She doesn't like having to sing it from the father's perspective, because she really has to become that person when she's singing it."