Songfacts®:

• This is one of four songs on Ride Me Back Home that Willie Nelson wrote with longtime producer and collaborator Buddy Cannon. In two of them, Nelson confronts death with a mix of humor and acceptance. On "Come on Time," he's outright daring the Grim Reaper to come and have a go if he thinks he's hard enough. Meanwhile, this song is about the realization that his time on earth is going to finish soon, whether he likes it or not.
• The song is actually a Last Man Standing leftover. That album, released in April 2018, is made up entirely of Nelson and Cannon-written tunes.
• Asked about his songwriting partnership with Willie Nelson, Buddy Cannon told Uncut magazine in 2019: "We've written maybe 35 to 40 songs together, all of them via text messaging. We've never sat down in a room with guitars. We bounce messages back and forth until we get a lyric we like, and then we get on the phone and talk about a melody or a groove, and that's usually when he'll tell me to go cut a track. But we really don't know what it's going to sound like until he sings it."