Songfacts®:

• Tenille Townes has some questions for God on this contemplative song from her major-label debut, The Lemonade Stand. The Canadian country singer can't make sense of a godly plan that allows tragedies to take the lives of young people, like a beloved high school athlete who was killed in a car crash and left a small town to mourn. But despite her feelings of anger, she doesn't demand answers but rather looks forward to the day she can have a conversation with God in heaven.
  
  "I love going to those places that are hard to talk about, because it's a courageous thing for people to bring that up," Townes told Billboard in 2019. "I love that the song stirs up that kind of emotion. I, in my own faith walk, have struggled with so many of those questions - and being able to be honest for having them is the one thing that has brought me closer to God in all of it."
• Townes got the idea for the song after performing at a high school in Grand Manan, New Brunswick, and learning that five of its students were involved in a fatal car accident in 2014 that killed the 17-year-old driver, Danielle Park, who was the senior class valedictorian and star basketball player.
  
  The image of the girl's jersey hanging in the gymnasium to honor her memory stuck in Townes' mind. She recalled the image when she went into a songwriting session with Gordie Sampson ("Jesus, Take The Wheel") and Tina Parol ("Champagne Night") in 2016. She was determined to write a song about it, especially since the feelings were stoked again as she watched her best friend grieve the loss of her little brother, Drayton Brennan.
  
  Parol, who felt powerless to help her own friend that was struggling with health issues, immediately connected with Townes' song idea about questioning God without abandoning faith. Parol told Billboard: "We sort of became allies in the room that day. We just met, but it's intense feeling something we're sharing. So, let's get it out in song, and let's make sure that it's not about not believing in God. It's about trusting him even when you don't understand why something so awful could happen to someone so good."
• The song's weighty subject matter is balanced out in the mid-tempo production built on drummer Fred Eltringham's kick-drum backbeat. The rest of the musical elements combined Townes' emotional vocals adds a ray of light to an otherwise dark tale.
  
  "There's this sort of hopeful ambiance," says Parol. "I don't know if it's the Hammond B3 or the synth patterns or whatever. It has this kind of bigness that gives it a triumphant hopefulness."
• Danielle Park's real-life jersey differs from Townes' description in the opening verse: She was #9 for the Grand Manan Breakers, not #27 for the Tigers. But the singer thought it was important to soften some of the details.
  
  "I didn't want to be on the nose directly about that town in too much of a heavy way," she explained.
• Townes doesn't reveal the athlete's fate until the end of the chorus, when she asks God, "Why can't you stop a car from crashing?" Co-writer Gordie Sampson credits the singer with unfolding the story in a somewhat misleading way to catch the listener off guard.
  
  "That was the way that Tenille wanted to steer the story, and she did it so wonderfully," he told Billboard. "It is an element that we use in writing all the time, and I'm currently really into these days, is to just mislead everybody a little bit during the verse. It's like the way great movies that we love mislead us."
• This is the second single from The Lemonade Stand, following "Somebody's Daughter." Both tracks were #1 hits on the Canadian Country chart.
• In a 2023 Songfacts interview, Townes said this song still holds a special place in her heart because it has touched so many people who have shared their own stories of loss with the singer.
  
  "It's so devastating to hear these stories, but it also fills me with hope knowing that we have all felt that way. That feels like the most isolating thing to go through, saying goodbye to somebody," she said.
  
  "I can't put into words how much I admire the courage it takes to talk about that. Music has this ability to push down the walls that we put up in ourselves and we can go into the places that are a little scary to go into alone, and you hear a song, and it makes it a little easier. That song has felt like the most tangible evidence of that to me."
• Townes, Sampson, and Parol shared the title of Songwriter of the Year at the 2020 Canadian Country Music Association Awards, where the song's video also earned the prize for Video of the Year.
• The music video, directed by Mason Dixon, shows Townes performing in a high school gymnasium, with the actual jerseys of Danielle Park and Drayton Brennan on display. The singer wanted the video to honor the late teens who inspired the song while still offering hope to people grieving their own losses.
  
  "Leaving space in this video for people to insert their own emotions and think of people in their own stories was so important to me," she told ET Canada. "There's an anchor of light coming in through the gym window, across the lockers and in the hallways that represents the ever-present hope that is still there, even in the darkest of losses."