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Album: Kane Brown (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Co-written with Sam Ellis and Blake Anthony Carter, Kane Brown tells here the story of his often difficult childhood and teenage years in Georgia, in which he struggled with an abusive stepfather and spent some time living in a car with his mom.

    "I wanted to write a song kind of being a role model and telling people that even though you go through some stuff, you learn from it, and it makes you the person you are today," Brown told The Boot. "You can't hold a grudge against anybody; you gotta let it go. That's just kinda what the song's about, and hopefully it touches a lot of people... Yeah, life's too short to hold grudges."
  • Brown is bi racial and on the second verse he recalls trying to fit in at middle but "gettin' looked down on just because of your skin." The Georgia native told Nashville's Tennessean newspaper that he was often the subject of racial slurs from his classmates. "Color does matter, even though people don't see it," he said. "I've lived it my whole life. It's just what I know."
  • Kane Brown kicks off the song by rap-singing:

    When I was six years old I kinda wet the bed
    My stepdad came in and nearly beat me to death
    .

    Brown recalled the background to the lyric during an interview with Taste of Country:

    "(Nana) took me in when my mom couldn't find anywhere to stay. (My mom) went off and met this dude, came back, and we lived in a trailer on my Papa's farm. There was this one day, I had a dream that I went and used the bathroom, but I was still in my bed. He came and woke me up and we had to go get my mom for work. I woke up and he just pretty much beat the crap out of me.

    Then my Nana picked up me up and she seen all the bruises and asked me how it happened and I told her. She was the only one I could really trust."

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