Ryan Adams originally named the song “Chris,” after Chris Feinstein, the recently deceased bass player in his backing band the Cardinals. Also, in the final version, he replaced the song's initial rawness with a sense of immediacy. “It was too raw,” Adams said. “And I think the idea was that you have to sing this and it has all of this emotional energy in it and you don’t want to write something or put something out that can fuse out. So I really learned this time. It’s almost like if the song has too much personal information, it’s almost kind of like a perishable and you can only leave it out for so long before it’s gonna get weird to you or sour.”