Songfacts®:

• The scene at the Dairy Queen got a little dicey the day a stranger approached Darryl Worley to give him a piece of his mind. "He said, 'Man, I swore when I saw you again I was gonna kick your ass." And Darryl, all 6'5" of him, turned to the man to take him up on his offer. "I said, 'Dude, I just had neck surgery two days ago. But if you'll give me about a month to heal up, I'll meet you right back here and we'll get it on.'"
  His would-be opponent quickly explained that, while he really had wanted to take Darryl on a while back, now he just wanted to say thanks. Darryl says the man told him he'd suffered two nervous breakdowns, and "'I was coming out of my second one when I heard your song. And I listened to it every day over and over again, every time they played it on the radio, I thought, Man, when I see him, I'm gonna kick his ass.' But he said, 'I promise you eventually, day after day, it started to mean something different to me,'" continues Darryl. "And he said, 'You're the reason that I'm back out here doing what I do, and I didn't wind up in the mental hospital. I pulled it together and I sucked it up.'"
  
  One would think that an a moment like that might get awkward, but Darryl takes it in stride. Where he comes from, "you sort of have to be looking out, because somebody might just walk up and punch you in the mouth. I'm always on guard."
• Co-written with award-winning songwriter Martin D. Sanders, Darryl knew this would always be one of his favorites. "I was coming out of the toughest time of my life," he says. "I'd been through a lot of tragic things, unfortunately. But I'm proud of that, because I don't think I will encounter anything down the road that I won't be able to handle. And that's important when you've got a baby and you're trying to bring a child up in this world we live in. It's inspired by those classic songwriters and singers, like Merle Haggard, and it's just about as honest as anybody could ever be. I play it now to remind me of how bad things could get. I tell my wife I don't wanna ever go back to that place, I don't ever want to be there and be that guy again, because it was a really tough time. I also think that sometimes when people hear that stuff, they might change their path a little bit, and I did. I mean, Haggard saved me a lot of problems. I listened to that music, I thought, you know what? I don't need to go there. So who knows, I could be affecting someone's life in a positive way, and that's always good."
• Darryl: "I don't measure my success by the number of awards that I have hanging on the wall. I just don't. And I've got a few. But there's not all that many of them that mean a whole lot to me, because a lot of stuff like that comes out of politics, and I'm not into that. And then a lot of it comes from just being at the right place at the right time." (Read more in our interview with Darryl Worley.)