Songfacts®:

• He doesn't remember specifics, but songwriter Matt Scannell says the word "forever" played through his head incessantly, and he wound up writing the chorus for this song around it. Then, he says, "for some reason I just came up with the first lines, 'take these roses off of me, let me live, let me be.'" And it wasn't until then that he realized this song was about losing someone:
  "It is about someone passing away. And the amazing thing for me is it was kind of just about wanting to hold onto the memory. It's actually more about people that have come and gone in my life, not really for me about one person. But I've had some very close friends pass away, and for some reason, I remember writing that chorus and just sort of feeling like there's a beauty... when someone's gone, you feel like you're dying in a way. And you're not, you just need to mourn it, you need to shoulder it for a while and kind of move through it until you can get back up straight again and move on. Or at least not let it go. And I think that's what this song is about, it's about not letting go, but not letting it stop you."
  
  "I get a lot of people saying, 'I lost my dad, and I listened to that song and it makes me remember something he said to me,' or 'it makes me think of him, and I love that song.' One of my dear friends whose father passed away, she told me that that's her song for her father. And that's the song that she uses to kind of keep him in her life. What an honor; it's a stunning, stunning feeling. I just got chills."
• Matt's lyrics tend to be more on the cryptic side, and intentionally so. He's a fan of open interpretation, and likes that his songs cause people to think about what he might have meant when he wrote them. He says, "Would you rather drive down the highway? Or would you rather drive down the twisty back roads up to the magical view? I want the twisty roads, thank you. And if my songs reflect that, then that's just fine."
  
  "It's one thing to me in my room late at night when I'm trying to exorcize my demons and get some of the stuff out that I need to get out," he says. "But it's another thing entirely when it gets out there in the world and resonates with people and it can become something that is beneficial, or even just a little whimsy, but something that they can attach to and hold as a positive thing. And I think another thing is I try to generally write songs that are a little bit more positive than negative. And maybe that's because I'm trying to perk myself up a little bit - talk myself up a little bit is a better word. But I also know now at this point that they're not just my songs. They're also everybody's songs." (Check out the full interview with Matt Scannell.)