Songfacts®:

• In this love ballad, Garth Brooks describes a romantic evening with his girl. He compares it to a work of art, using color metaphors to describe the two lovers' passions. The song was inspired by co-writer Lisa Sanderson's visit to the Louvre in Paris. Brooks later recalled on The Hits liner notes: "'The Red Strokes' came to me as a poem from Lisa Sanderson. She had visited The Louvre in France and talked about a painting that was just all brush strokes. She noticed how the red ones stuck out and wondered, if she was to paint her life, how many red strokes would there be for the passion, anger and times of most emotion. I fell in love with the poem."
• "The Red Strokes" is one of Garth's most popular songs in the United Kingdom, despite only charting on the Country chart in the US (#49) and Canada (#38) as an album cut.
• In his 2017 book, The Anthology Part 1: The First Five Years, Brooks elaborated on the lyric, "thundering moments of tenderness rage." He wrote: "It reminded me of a Dan Fogelberg song, a song called 'Leader Of The Band,' where he talks about his dad, a 'thundering velvet hand.' It's the idea that these aren't contradictions - the thunder and the velvet - just two sides of a thing, kind of two sides of a passionate life. And those thundering moments of tenderness, rage - again, man, it's also just another beautiful way to talk about my favorite subject to sing about, and that is passion. A song like this is one of those pictures that you get to paint as a songwriter. I'm getting to use words to talk about oils and paints on a canvas, and about lives lived passionately. Music is the thing that gets there in the most satisfying way."
• This is the sixth and final single from Brooks' sixth studio album, In Pieces. The album debuted at #1 in America, where it sold more than 10 million copies by 2020.
• Songwriters Jenny Yates ("Standing Outside The Fire") and James Garver, a longtime member of Garth's studio and touring band, also contributed to the track.
• The dramatic music video, directed by Jon Small, opens with a white-tuxedoed Brooks and his white grand piano rising from a pool of red paint. The scene was filmed in reverse, with the singer and the piano actually being lowered into the paint. The six-day shoot, which required 18 white tuxedos, 12 white Stetsons, 5,000 gallons of mud, 35 gallons of paint, and six baby grand pianos, was almost too much for the singer to endure. He explained: "The paint, which had been stored outside, was so cold that as I was going under I started hyperventilating. I thought it was the last anyone was going to see of me." Luckily, the paint was too thick for the lowering mechanism and they had to try again the next day, when the paint was much warmer.
• The clip won the Top Video of the Year Award at the ACM Awards in 1995.