Savior's Shadow

Album: If I'm Honest (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This slow gospel tune came to Blake Shelton in a dream during the summer of 2015. After waking up, he wrote down everything he could remember. The singer then asked songwriter Jessi Alexander ("I Drive Your Truck," "The Climb") and her husband, Jon Randall ("Whiskey Lullaby," "Drink On It"), to help him complete it. Shelton and Alexander had recently co-written "Friends" for the movie Angry Birds.
  • Alexander told Taste of Country: "It's beautiful and moving and I can't wait for him to tell the story. It's almost his 'Why Me' - it's very deep to him and to us. It came deep from Blake's soul and we were just glad we got to kind of help him birth it."

    "Why Me" is a well-known Kris Kristofferson song written during an emotionally low period of his life. He penned it after attending a religious service conducted by the Rev. Jimmie Rogers Snow.
  • The words to the song were a powerful source of strength to Blake Shelton when his marriage to Miranda Lambert was crumbling. "We both knew that it wasn't going to work out, and I was walking around, randomly singing that song to myself, and somehow it would make me feel better," Shelton recalled to Billboard magazine. "At first I thought it was that I'm so sad and pitiful that even God feels sorry for me and He's crying for me. And then I thought, 'No, it's just that He's on this journey with me and He's walking with me.'"
  • Jon Randall and Jessi Alexander also supply the harmony vocals.
  • The string section was recorded at Ocean Way. It was an appropriate location as it is a former church with stained-glass windows.
  • The vocals were all recorded in a walk-in closet at Shelton's Los Angeles residence. Producer Scott Hendricks told Billboard, "It's a pretty nice closet, I will say. But it didn't matter. I mean, we were haulin' and he was comfortable. That's what mattered."

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