Songfacts®:

• "When I Die" came to Shack Shakers singer-songwriter JD Wilkes in a dream where he heard the crooner Dex Romweber of Flat Duo Jets singing it. Wilkes says that many of his songs start as dreams.
• Like many of the songs on the Swampblood album, this song deals with death. It finds Wilkes asking a loved one to comfort his corpse as he will be awaiting her in the afterworld.
• Wilkes hoped to have Romweber sing the song on the Legendary Shack Shakers' album Swampblood, but he ended up singing it himself.
• Wilkes recorded the piano part for the song immediately after waking from the dream in which he heard it. "I woke up in the middle of the night with it still in my head, ran to the piano and taped it on a little Walmart tape recorder, he said in his Songfacts interview. "So the piano you hear is me capturing the song immediately, with it still ringing in my head from my dream. The lyrics I put to it later, kind of half-remembering what Dex was singing. It was just simple: three rhymes, three little lines, about not wanting to die alone. It's a very honest thing, it was like a song-catching from your own dream state."