Songfacts®:

• This ballad with a message of the power of forgiveness was the first solo single released by Ronnie Dunn since the Brooks & Dunn duo disbanded in 2010. "This song knocked me out from the first listen," said Ronnie. "I genuinely felt the spirit of the lyrics in my gut. It's a really big song, and it needed to be sung."
  
  Brooks & Dunn returned to action in 2015.
• The song was not the type Ronnie was intent on releasing as his first solo single. "One day, I get this e-mail from a friend, and it's a song called 'Bleed Red.' So I listened to it, just to be nice, and it knocked me out," he explained. "It wasn't necessarily the suit that I was planning on wearing to the dance, so to speak, but it was a big song, and I said, 'I'm gonna have to beat Bono to the punch.' [laughs] It sounded like U2, and I'm going, 'Okay, so what if Conway Twitty were to come in and put a vocal on this anyway and cut the song?' So that's what we did."
• The song's music video starts with a poignant moment between a father and his daughter. Dunn told Country Forever how he found the inspiration in his own backyard. "The way the opening scene happened was I grabbed Haley, my youngest daughter, as she came in from school one afternoon," he explained. "I said, 'Let's go get a still picture for something.' There's an old horse trailer in a field out here behind my house, and we went out there to do a still shot. These cameras are both still and video, and I said, 'Let's just wing something here.' She had just broken up with her boyfriend, and this is bad of me to do, but I said, 'Let's try this real quick; let's just ad lib these lines.' Sure enough, at three takes, that's what we have there on film. Then we just added and made it up as we went and let the story develop from that simple, intimate moment of having to find forgiveness in a situation like that, to much broader, more global, more universal things that are going on."