Songfacts®:

• Jason Isbell's parents were both teenagers when he was born, and they later divorced. Here, Isbell sings of a tumultuous childhood and a broken home.
  
  Why can't daddy just come home?
  Forget whatever he did wrong
  He's in a hotel all alone
  And we need him
• Though there were many difficult, heartbreaking moments in his home life, there were some beautiful ones too. Isbell reflects in the chorus:
  
  A dreamsicle on a summer night
  In a folding lawn chair
  I'm still packing up my room
  Gotta get home soon
  
  He explained to Apple Music: "It's a sad story about a child who's in the middle of a home that's breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive - and that's what the chorus does - then once you're there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It's sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You're just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home."
• Both Isbell and his wife Amanda Shires were very young when their parents split up. "I was blending our two stories," he explained to "Austin City Limits Live. "It's not exactly a heartbreaking song, it's just sort of a picture of a kid's life. I wanted to keep the voice of the child-narrator but also retain a retrospective quality to show it's something the child survived."
• Isbell previously sang about his parents' and in-laws' marriage on his 2015 track "Children of Children." On that song he contemplates their early entry into parenthood.