Tim McGraw Tugs at the Heartstrings With New Single, ‘I Called Mama’

Grab the tissues because there’s a good chance Tim McGraw’s touching new single, “I Called Mama,” will make you cry.

Released just days before Mother’s Day, the emotional song couldn’t be more timely. On the surface, the tune serves as a reminder for people everywhere to pick up the phone and call their moms, however, the message goes much deeper than that.

“Got a call from a friend about a friend/ It’s news no one ever wants to hear/ It hit me like a punch, it took my breath/ He was just gettin’ into his best years/Yeah, something like that’ll shake you up, wake you up,” McGraw sings on the first verse.

After taking a moment to decompress, McGraw turns to the one person he can count on to get him through a difficult time: his mother.

“On the one hand this song is literally, ‘hey, call your mom.’ On the other hand, you look at a time like this, there are real hardships for everyone, and it’s a great reminder that hearing someone’s voice who knows you and loves you can help you get through anything,” McGraw previously shared in a statement. “I think it’s at these very difficult times that music can help and the power of a song can give someone a moment of clarity or comfort, or just a smile. Especially now, when we seem to need it more than ever.”

“I Called Mama,” which was written by Lance Miller, Marv Green and Jimmy Yeary and produced by McGraw and Byron Gallimore, was originally planned to be just an album cut for McGraw’s forthcoming project, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting people everywhere, McGraw and his team shifted their plans.

“It was sort of unexpected in a lot of ways because I cut the song before all of this [COVID-19 quarantine] stuff happened … to add to the album I’ve been working on for a while, and it’s been just slowly cutting songs and mixing them and remixing them and putting music together. And I found these songs I wanted to go in and get done before the summer came and the [2020 Here on Earth] Tour came, and “Mama” was one of them,” McGraw recently explained to The Boot.

“But then when all of this sort of upheaval in the world came along, it really started making more and more sense that this song really meant a different thing in a lot of ways,” he continued. “There was a lot of carrying a lot of weight along with it, and as you listen to it and you think about the personal level, but that’s something that’s sort of existential in a way that speaks to things that are going on outside of what the song is saying, and to have a personal song that’s something that big when you look at it from a different perspective when the world changed, it was hard to ignore. It was hard to not want to pay attention to the song being, for me, a sort of catharsis during this time.”

Click above to listen to “I Called Mama.”