“My wife went through a tough time with cancer several years ago, and I wrote a song about that, and it was almost just something to help me as much as her. And I didn’t know if I wanted it to be on the album, but it was,” he adds. “It wasn’t a single or anything, but I tried to think that it might help other people that are going through something like that.”
The wrenching country ballad is almost too personal to bear.
“So shocked and disillusioned, helpless and confused / Not knowing how and what to say, not accepting that it’s true / You can’t help but see the worst to come a thousand different ways / The same time trying to hold a strong and optimistic gaze / When I saw you leaving / When I saw you leaving / When I saw you leaving in my mind,” he sings in the painful, but ultimately triumphant song.
Denise Jackson beat her cancer after chemotherapy and prayer, and in an interview with the Palm Beach Post in 2012, Alan Jackson admitted that her diagnosis “made us change our whole outlook on life, what we value and what’s important. That’s what happens in situations like that.”
Jackson will release a massive new album titled Where Have You Gone on May 14, 2021. The 21-song new project features “You’ll Always Be My Baby” and “I Do,” which Jackson wrote for his daughters’ weddings, and there’s also a song inspired by Jackson’s mother titled “Where Her Heart Has Always Been,” which he wrote for her funeral.