Songfacts®:

• This was the lead single from Rascal Flatt's album Unstoppable.
• The song was written by Clint Lagerberg and American Idol finalist Chris Sligh. It was Sligh's first tune to be recorded by another artist, as well as the first song that he gave to his publisher, Brentwood-Benson. He commented in a statement: "Clint and I wrote this song on a Monday, recorded the demo on a Tuesday and that Wednesday Flatts label put it on hold. To have Rascal Flatts be the very first artist to cut a song I've written is pretty unbelievable. Songwriting has always been something I love, but this is just beyond any expectations I could have ever had. Clint and I felt it was a special song, but the band's recording gives us chills and we've heard the song for almost a year."
• In its first week on iTunes, the song's digital download sold 126,000 copies. This broke the record for the best first-week sales of any Country digital single.
• Guitarist Joe Don Rooney told CMT News how the trio reacted when they were first played this song: "We always look for a song that's unique. That one came across the table, and for us, it was really wonderful. It had everything that Rascal Flatts is all about. It had the big chorus. It had a really unique melody and a killer hook. We just knew that Gary would sing the dog out of it, no doubt about it. The demo was just a piano and a vocal. I had always heard it like that, as well. I think Jay and our producer, Dann Huff, were like, 'Let's cut this thing with a big band. Let's make this thing as big as it can be.' I'm glad they had the idea because it's become this behemoth of a song. Once it's over, you're wringing yourself out. That's what we want. That's the big thing we want on the big side of songs we cut. We're just lucky to have that one. It's one of the first songs we put on hold for the project."
• This leapt from #6 to #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. It was only the third song to vault to the summit from outside the top five in the 21st century. The previous two to achieve this feat were Taylor Swift's "Our Song" and Garth Brooks' "More Than a Memory."
• Contemporary Christian singer-songwriter Chris Sligh explained to The Boot how he came to write this song: "When you're a Christian singer, it's really hard to write break-up songs when you're married. I was writing with a guy named Clint Lagerberg, who's a good friend of mine. We knew Flatts were recording, and he said, 'Hey, let's write a song for Flatts.' They kind of have a formula that works very, very well for them, and the nice thing about [lead singer] Gary's voice is that he has one of the few in country music that has that range of an octave-and-a-half. That's the nice thing about writing for Flatts - you can write real pop songs, when other times when you're writing for other people, you have to write less than an octave range. So we wrote it specifically for Gary. As soon as we wrote it, we knew it was really special.
  Gary and Jay [DeMarcus] have both come up and said, 'That's my favorite song that we've ever done.' That's encouraging, but who knows, he probably tells every songwriter that. [laughs] The whole thing with Rascal Flatts was exciting because it was like, 'Oh, he can write songs. I guess he's not just a singer off American Idol.''"