Jason Aldean doesn’t write a lot of his songs. But he did co-write “Help You Remember,” a song from his latest Songs About Us album, out now. Aldean penned “Help You Remember” with band members Kurt Allison and Tully Kennedy, plus John Morgan and Lydia Vaughan. “Help You Remember” is a deeply personal song, inspired by two family members who are close to him.
“My uncle, my mom’s brother, had passed away of Lewy body dementia,” Aldean tells People. “I watched my cousin, who was his only child, deal with that, and I did what I could to help get him through that.”
In addition to his uncle struggling with dementia, the father of his wife, Brittany Aldean, is currently struggling with dementia as well.
“That was really tough,” Aldean admits. “Watching my family and my wife’s family go through these kinds of things –– I mean, it’s heartbreaking. It’s tough to watch.”
It took those two heartbreaking stories for Aldean to share his own pain, revealing it the only way he knew how, through his music.
“I don’t go out and air out my laundry on social media or whatever,” Aldean explains. “If I go through things, I kind of internalize it and deal with it and compartmentalize things and move on.”
The Story Behind “Help You Remember” by Jason Aldean
Aldean first enlisted Kennedy to bring “Help You Remember” to life. The song says in part, “Help you remember? / Would it all come back to you again? / If we got in that truck right now / And drove out to watch that made you smile sunset / The heart knows what’s hiding / Even when the mind can’t find it / Even if you don’t, I still ain’t gonna stop trying, yeah / To help you remember / What I’ll never forget.”
“He and I sat there that night and just worked up the idea of what we thought it should be,” Aldean recalls. “We were trying to figure out how do we write this more like a ‘Live Like You Were Dying’ than just this really sad song.”
Aldean knew when they finished writing “Help You Remember” that it was something special. But the father of four admits he was surprised at how much his fans related to the song.
“The more we were playing it for people dealing with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, the more you could just tell it was connecting,” Aldean recounts. “They don’t expect that from us on an album. So, to have something like that to kind of turn it on its head a little bit was a good thing.”
Although the song was partly inspired by his father-in-law, Aldean didn’t play it for his wife until it was completed.
“We wrote it and demoed it, and that’s when I told her I had something to play for her,” Aldean says. “She started crying. And then we played it for my mom, and got the same response from her. I really wrote it for my mom and for my wife and for my family – and I mean, it was therapeutic for me, too.”
Photo Credit: CMA / Natasha Moustache