2012Released
3:39

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Poison & Wine. By Songfacts®.

This song is about a classic love/hate relationship; the chorus is a repetition of the line, "I don't love you but I always will." It's the first single from The Civil Wars, which was the duo of CCM vocalist Joy Williams and guitarist/songwriter John Paul White. This song makes it sound like they were in a tortured love affair, and indeed they were married, just not to each other - they had recently met at a songwriting camp and drew on relationships with their spouses for the lyrics.

John Paul White explained the song's meaning to UK newspaper, The Sun: "That song has parallels to our band and our band name," he said. "It's about all those battles you have with your spouse though it could be about addiction or even about your job. It was therapeutic to write. We asked each other, 'What would you scream at your partner - without them hearing or without any of the fallout - if you needed to get something off your chest?' And that's how we wrote that song. We love to write in a way that is inclusive."

Williams and White wrote this song with the Nashville writer Chris Lindsey, who co-wrote the Lonestar #1 hit "Amazed." Lindsey is married to another top songwriter, Aimee Mayo. He told the story of the song when he was a guest on the Songfacts Podcast: "I was going to write at EMI downtown with them, and I was running a little late. Well, Aimee and I are pretty famous for fighting, and we had about a two-day fight going on and it culminated right before I left. I took the title in based on that fight with Aimee before I left, and there are three or four lines in that song that came out of Aimee's mouth, directed at me. One of them was, 'You think your dreams are the same as mine.' She threw something at me and screamed that out in our driveway. There are two lines in that song she said verbatim that I took. So I was completely roiled up. I went down there and threw this title out. I never picked up a guitar, which was unusual for me - 75 percent of the time I'm the music guy in the room, but with those two I had a lyric pad, threw out the title and just started slinging lyrics. It's the only song I've ever been on where I've written most of the lyric, not the music. They obviously had a lot of lyrics too, but it just came to me: 'I don't love you but I always will.' It's another me and Aimee thing. They brought their worlds to it too, but from my side, it was like 'Amazed' after the honeymoon. A more mature love song."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Poison & Wine.
C♯Key
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
154BPM

Album

The album Poison & Wine is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Poison & Wine.
Columbia
(P) 2011 Sensibility Records LLC & The Civil Wars LLC under exclusive license to Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited, except track 13 2011 Ora Et Labora Productions and British Broadcasting Association (BBC)

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