Songfacts®:

• Ever wonder what a "drunken sky" is? Or a "dreaming tree"? Turns out it's entirely up to interpretation. Songwriter Tommy Lee James says of his co-writer, lyricist Robin Lerner, "it was really one of those things that we wrote in one night. She wrote the whole lyric, which is really amazing, because it's just so poetic and just so beautiful. There's some rhymes in there, I don't know what they mean, and I don't know if Robin would tell you, either." Which is only because she likes that listeners can choose to fit it into their own circumstances, with a meaning based on their personal experiences.
  
  Lerner and James have co-written on many occasions, often with spectacular results. James explains, "She's a great lyricist in LA. We've been writing for a few years together, and she is completely different from writing with anybody else that I co-write with. And she just makes me start playing stuff. And so I basically just played the music, just messing around, and pretty much had the music in five minutes. This song just kind of came out, a moment of inspiration. And then she went away and wrote the whole lyric, and then came back and played it for me." With jaw-dropping results.
• In James' vast experience in Nashville songwriting, it's unusual for a Country song to be left open to listener interpretation, "Because in Nashville we really like to spell it out what we're saying. And so I think that's what's really cool about it. And I've never asked her what it means. There's just some great images."
  
  This song is also unusual by James' standards because it's one of only two that he's co-written that he didn't contribute to the lyrics. The other is "Wrong Again" by Martina McBride. He is, however, an accomplished lyricist and really loves writing lyrics, "Especially in some more of the Pop stuff I've been writing recently."
• Tim McGraw was the perfect artist to record this song, according to James. He had just the touch required to turn something that was "'out there' for Country radio" into a smash hit. "And I don't think anybody else would have recorded it but Tim. And Tim's probably the only person that could have had a hit with something that poetic and that non-Country. It was just the perfect timing, that he liked it and wanted to cut it. But his voice on that song just kills me, it's just a great record. The song is kind of like the foundation, but then the singer and the production have to really bring something home to make it work." (Check out our interview with Tommy Lee James.)
• McGraw's wife, Faith Hill, had a mega hit in 1998 with "This Kiss," which was co-written by Lerner and featured the unusual chorus lyric, "It's centrifugal motion, it's perpetual bliss, it's that pivotal moment."