Songfacts®:

• Eric Church surprised his fan club members, known as The Church Choir, when a 10-track album was dropped into their email box on November 3, 2015. Some select fans and radio stations also got copies of the record, titled Mr. Misunderstood, on CD and vinyl.
  
  Church unveiled the title track at the 2015 Country Music Association Awards, where the news of the new disc became evident.
• In a handwritten letter to fans, Church explained how he wrote his first track for the album in the late summer. Within three weeks he had accumulated 18 songs. Twenty days following that, he had 10 of them recorded.
  
  Church added that his then-3-year-old son influenced Mr. Misunderstood. Boone McCoy Church is the centerpiece of closing track "Three Year Old" and the reason the singer picked up a special guitar named "Butter Bean" on which he wrote the songs for the new album.
• The song is a cheer to misfit kids, and the video features Church, his band and a teenager with braces and glasses sitting in the back of a classroom. The kid feels like an oddball, but Church and his musicians take the boy to one of their gigs and teach him how to play guitar, giving him some confidence.
  
  The young Buddy Holly-esqe boy is played by McKinley James "Mickey" Smay. The youngster's father, who also appears in the clip, is drummer Jason Smay, formerly of the American instrumental rock band Los Straitjackets. Mickey features on the album cover as well.
• The music clip was named Video of the Year at the 2016 ACM Awards. "It's the cheapest video ever that ever won Video of the Year, I'll bet," Church said. "It's just us."
• Church often mentions other musicians in his songs. In this one, we learn that Mr. Misunderstood listens to Elvis Costello, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy - quite an eclectic mix. Church wrote his 2018 song "Desperate Man" with Hubbard.