Written by Bobby Braddock, who also wrote Tracy Lawrence's 1995 hit "Texas Tornado," "Time Marches On" follows the lives of a young family and the hardships they face as they grow older. By the end of the song, the philandering father is dead, the long-suffering mother has Alzheimer's disease, the baby sister is a grandmother, and the dope-smoking brother battles high cholesterol. "The only thing that stays the same," Lawrence sings, "is everything changes, everything changes."
Braddock told The Tennessean the story behind the song: "It was just a culmination of a lot of different things that started to come together. I would go down to my little hometown in Florida and I noticed that the people who were middle-aged were gone. My younger teachers were then middle-aged or late middle-aged, and I've always been interested in time and physics and the 'what-ifs' of life. And I just got the idea of writing a song about this family that just spends their whole lifetime in about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, and put some things in there that we're not supposed to put in country songs, like dementia."
Braddock wanted the melody to resemble the ticking of a clock.
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