Travis Tritt Wrote This Hit Single Amid His Own Personal Heartache

In 1991, Travis Tritt had a big hit with “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)”. The song, the first single from It’s All About To Change, Tritt’s sophomore album, was written solely by Tritt.

An uptempo look at a relationship ending, “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares” says, “You say you were wrong, to ever leave me alone / Now you’re sorry, you’re lonesome and scared / And you say you’d be happy, if you could just come back home / Well here’s a quarter, call someone who cares / Call someone who’ll listen and might give a damn / Maybe one of your sordid affairs / But don’t you come ’round here handing me none of your lines / Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.”

A hit single for Tritt, the song actually came from his own personal heartache.

“That was a song that I had written years before I ever came to Nashville,” Tritt tells The Boot. “I was going through a divorce, and I had been married twice before I ever was signed to a record deal. Before the audiences out there ever knew anything about me, I was divorced twice. And the second divorce came about just prior to signing my record contract with Warner Bros. back in the late ‘80s.”

What Inspired Travis Tritt To Write “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)”

Tritt recalls the moment he had the inspiration for “Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)”. He came home from work and found an empty house. His wife left while he was gone, leaving him with almost nothing.

“I thought I had been robbed,” Tritt remembers. “The front door was standing wide open. The back door was standing wide open. You could see right through the house, and everything that was in it was basically gone. I was sitting in my living room, in one of the one or two pieces of furniture that she had left behind, and there was a knock on the door. It was from the sheriff’s department: They were serving me with divorce papers.”

Ironically, while Tritt was reading the divorce papers, his soon-to-be-ex-wife called Tritt after having a change of heart.

“After that conversation, I sat there and thought to myself, ‘Do I really want to consider getting back together at this point?’” Tritt recalls. “A lot of water had gone under the bridge, obviously, between when we got together and now. And, ‘Do I really want to consider reconciliation at this point?’ And that’s when the lyrics came to me for ‘Here’s A Quarter’.”

Photo by Paul Natkin/WireImage

The post Travis Tritt Wrote This Hit Single Amid His Own Personal Heartache appeared first on American Songwriter.