Songfacts®:

• On October 9, 2020 Rodney Crowell went for a hike in the hills around his house. Afterwards the singer-songwriter asked his wife, Claudia, if he'd been for a walk. He posed the same question eight more times, so Claudia took him to hospital for a MRI scan. Once he'd come to his senses a few hours later, Crowell asked for his notebook and penned this song about his health scare.
• A sunflower growing on a narrow raft in a fog bank on the Thames
  Adrift above the tide slime where nothing holy swims
  
  Crowell told Billboard his inspiration came from a text his daughter sent him the morning after he went into hospital containing "a photograph of a sunflower growing on a piece of driftwood on the Thames River in the 1950s."
  
  Still lying in his hospital bed, Crowell started writing the song in his notebook. By the time he was released about noon, Crowell had got a couple of verses going and he finished it up that afternoon at home.
• Crowell recorded the song for his Triage album. The last track to go on the record, he wrote and laid it down in a matter of days.
• Los Angeles-based filmmaker and musician Haroula Rose (Once Upon a River, American Horror Story) directed the song's music video. The clip includes a scene of Crowell spreading the ashes of his friend, Guy Clark's widow Susanna Clark.
  
  Crowell told Billboard Guy Clark had given him half of her ashes, which he planned to set free on the Little Harpeth River. On March 11, 2021, Susanna's birthday, he gathered many of her close friends, including Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Garner, and Verlon Thompson, to do the deed. They were filming the video the same day, so Crowell told Haroula she could shoot the ceremony if she wanted to.