Songfacts®:

• Producer Rick Rubin, who at one point was slated to work on the album, challenged Kid Rock to write something more than a lap-dance soundtrack. Rock told the Los Angeles Times: "He basically told me that he had been listening to me my whole career and that he thought I had something more in me, something relevant. I thought: 'I'll show him.' I went to a friend's house over in Malibu overlooking a bluff and I sat there and looked at the ocean. And I thought: 'Amen.' What a powerful word."
  
  Starting with the title, he wrote this song voicing his frustration with problems in American society in the midst of the war in Iraq and famine in Africa.
• Kid Rock has claimed this is the best song he's ever written.
• The song features the gospel choir The Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were originally formed in 1871 to raise funds for Fisk University in Nashville. In seven years they raised over $150,000 for the university. In 1909 they made the first recording of the spiritual, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
• Kid Rock preaches unity and common sense in this song, and he also takes a shot at religious leaders who have made him distrustful:
  
  I'll tell you sometimes people I don't know what's worse
  Natural disasters or these wolves in sheep clothes pastors
  Now damn it I'm scared to send my children to church
• The video was directed by Pulitzer Prize winning documentary photographer David Turnley.
• Rock performed this at the Grammy Awards in 2009.
• Kid Rock became known as a conservative firebrand and staunch supporter of Donald Trump, but this song was not politically partisan, and Rock even played it at one of Barack Obama's inaugural balls. It happened on January 20, 2009, when Rock joined Kanye West and Fall Out Boy in performing at the Youth Ball, which was broadcast live on MTV. Rock later explained that he didn't vote for Obama, but was excited for the promise of change. "That promise hasn't been fulfilled," he said. "The country is more divided than ever."