Songfacts®:

• This lyrically potent song was co-penned by Bentley with Ryan Tyndell and Riser producer Ross Copperman. The tracks cut for Riser tell the of the ups and downs Bentley had experienced since the release of 2012's Home, ranging from the loss of his father to the birth of his third child, Knox. "I didn't want to cover any ground that I had covered before," Bentley said at a private listening party for the album. "I wanted to make it a little more moody, I guess."
  
  "I know my dad passed away, but it wasn't really that," he continued. "Maybe subconsciously it influenced it, but it kind of opened a new portal in my life to sing a new reality. A lot of stuff has gone on in culture in general – school shootings and stuff like that. It opened up bigger things to write about, and on songs like 'Riser' and 'Here On Earth,' it kind of comprises the core of that."
• Bentley wrote this song while he was thinking about his father and the Sandy Hook school shooting. He told Rolling Stone: "Those things were really weighing on me. I was on the bus and we wrote the song in a couple hours."
  
  He added: "The vocal, it just came out in one full pass on the bus. We had the microphone sitting up on a window, which is probably not the most ideal microphone placement. It just got me thinking, 'What am I singing in studios for?' I am way more comfortable in a natural environment around people and that just feels right. I'd never written a song like that before either, without the usual country structure of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, out, that song just came from my gut."
• On Friday, December 14, 2012, Adam Peter Lanza shot dead twenty-eight people at The Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, including many children and teachers. The slaughter sent shockwaves through the nation and has fuelled many songs about the needlessness of gun violence including ones by George Strait "(I Believe"), Sheryl Crow ("Best Of Times") and Snoop Lion "(No Guns Allowed").
• Bentley told Country Weekly that he sent the song to Bono, whom he has been friends with since meeting in Nashville in 2011. The U2 singer replied praising the song adding that the lyrics remind him of a prayer. "I was like, 'Wow, he totally gets it,'" Bentley boasted.