Travis Tritt turned heartbreak into a hit song.
The lead-off single from his 1991 It’s All About To Change album is one of country music’s best “f*ck you” songs. The hit was a massive radio success for Tritt, but despite being one of his best-known songs, his record label wasn’t quite sold on the message.
So, what inspired this ultimate ’90s country heartbreak ballad?
While married to his second wife, Jodi Barnett, Tritt came home one afternoon to find an emptied-out house with only a few pieces of furniture and his belongings left behind. After realizing that he hadn’t been robbed, and that his wife was gone with the belongings, he was beginning to put two and two together. Just to confirm his suspicions, he heard a knock at the door, opening it to be served with divorce papers.
Pretty brutal way to leave someone if you ask me.
After that rollercoaster of emotions, the ride wouldn’t end as he received a call shortly after being served by his wife, who was already questioning whether filing for divorce was the right move. But at this point, as Travis said during an interview, it was too late for that:
“Far too much water had gone under the bridge for that. ‘You made this decision,’ I said. ‘You’ve taken it this far. You filed for the divorce. You moved out. It’s done. There’s no turning back.’ [There were] lots of tears from both ends of the telephone.”
Right after hanging up the phone, solidifying that the couple wouldn’t get back together, Tritt put a pen to paper and wrote this single. And it only took him fifteen minutes to write the hit.
“You say you were wrong to ever leave me aloneAnd now you’re sorry, you’re lonesome and scaredAnd you say you’d be happy if you could just come back homeWell, here’s a quarter, call someone who cares”
And Travis said that entire song was cathartic for him, helping him laugh about the situation he was in:
“The whole song took less than 15 minutes. When I got done, I just cracked up laughing. All, the venom, all the anger, had been translated into ‘Here’s a Quarter,’ and I felt better than I had in months.
The song was my personal talisman… I never intended to play it for anyone else. It took me years to be able to play that song in front of an audience.”
While his label thought that the song was gimmicky upon first listening, he was persistent that he wanted to put it out. There have been many times labels are wrong about hit singles, and thankfully they took his lead on this one because it was a massive success.
This song is hands down one of the best and most iconic out of his discography. Fire it up.
