Around the time Brett Eldredge was kicking off his career, his grandmother, was struggling with Alzheimer's disease. The country singer was having a hard time making sense of it all, so he decided to turn to music to help.
Eldredge "chased down" the emotions he was feeling from his grandmother's illness, and wrote a song called "Raymond." The song, inspired by the 5.8 million Americans living with Alzheimer's, was dedicated to his grandmother.
"Raymond" tells the story of a man who continuously visits an assisted living facility where one of the patients thinks he is her son because she is living with dementia.
"When she calls me Raymond, she thinks I’m her son," Eldredge sings in the chorus of the song. "Tells me get washed up for supper, before your daddy gets home. She goes on about the weather, how she can’t believe it’s already 1943. She calls me Raymond, and that’s all right by me."
"Instead of saying ‘You know, I’m not your son,’ and making her feel wrong for having some disease or not being able to remember, he goes along with it and it keeps a smile on her face,” Eldredge explained to People.
"Raymond" was first released in 2011 as a part of the Alzheimer's Association's "Music Moment" initiative. Eldredge decided to re-record a new version of the ballad to dedicate to his grandmother who has since passed away.
"My grandmother was the most amazing, selfless person I think I have ever known," he says. "It’s almost like she never even took time for herself because she was giving so much love to everybody else and her family and that’s all she cared about. I still see her face in the crowd now even though she’s not here anymore. It’s that powerful of a thing to have somebody there for you, and she was there for me from beginning to end."
"From the moment I watched my grandmother go through this, I knew that I wanted to help make sure that others didn’t have to go through seeing somebody struggling with Alzheimer’s disease,” Eldredge says in the video below. "I really do feel that we are going to find a day when Alzheimer’s is no more, and we will sing a lot more songs about it."
Watch Eldredge's performance of "Raymond" dedicated to his late grandmother below.
Photo: Getty Images