From: Songfacts — Mark Farner (ex-Grand Funk)
Songfacts: How did you come up with that song? It seems so unusual – so long and it changes gears in the middle.
Farner: Initially the song came to me after I said my prayers one night and I put a P.S. on the end of my prayers. I asked God to give me a song that would touch the hearts of people that the Creator wanted to get to. I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning – I’m always getting up at different times of the night and writing things down. A lot of them are not songs but this happened to be one.
I got up and I wrote it, and as I’m writing it, I’m between the state of subconscious and conscious. I’ve got one foot in dreamland and my pen is writing these words down. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was kind of weird, I thought, as I was writing it. I didn’t sit there on the edge of the bed and read it over and over, I just wrote it down, and when I got to the end of it, I just folded it over and put it on the nightstand. There it was.
Well, in the morning, I got up, I was drinking my coffee, I was looking at the horses out in the pasture, and I got my feet kicked up. I thought, I’ll grab my flattop here. I had an acoustic George Washburn, a resonant guitar from my kitchen – everybody would grab it when they came here. I started playing. Wow, that’s nice, what the heck is that? Then I made that C chord. I made a mistake. I was going for the G and it was a little short and I hit the C. And I looked down because that chord spoke to me in such a way. I’ve never heard that come out, that inversion of the C. I thought, Wow, that’s a cool chord. Then I thought maybe with those words in the other room, maybe that’s a song, so I grabbed the legal pad and laid it down on the table next to my coffee and I just started strumming. “Everybody…” And it just started coming out. …