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Ronald LaPread began writing this song a couple of days after his wife Kathy Faye was diagnosed with terminal cancer. You can feel all the emotion poured into this song.

The E♭m13 chord before the chorus and interlude has no seventh, and the third and fifth are only played by the guitars. It could also be thought of as Fm/E♭, which is the voicing the Rhodes plays.

Cal Harris did a pretty good, but not a perfect job in doubling all the small variations in the bassline on a synth in the choruses and outro, leading to some discrepancies, in m. 99 most notably.

m. 49 Something like that is going on here. Not entirely sure I got that detail right, the notes are there somewhere, but it could also be an artefact from the strings.

m. 54 This is the only verse with no rest on the 2. No rest as well in the intro and interlude.

Annotations

Ronald LaPread began writing this song a couple of days after his wife Kathy Faye was diagnosed with terminal cancer. You can feel all the emotion poured into this song.

The E♭m13 chord before the chorus and interlude has no seventh, and the third and fifth are only played by the guitars. It could also be thought of as Fm/E♭, which is the voicing the Rhodes plays.

Additional resources

• Live at The Summit, Houston, Texas, USA (1977) @24:22

  The only live video footage of this song from that era.

• Unreleased Alternate Mix (2003)

  A longer version, taken from Lionel Richie’s compilation album “The Definitive Collection” (Limited Edition), adding 55 seconds at the beginning of the outro after the last chorus and another 30 seconds at the end.

• Excerpt from “Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Story Behind the Song” (2009)

  Read Ronald LaPread’s touching memories of writing the song and the emotional times it was written in.