Travis Tritt Expressed His Grief in “Here’s A Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares”

Travis Tritt was an integral part of the country music with hits like “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.” The Grammy Award-winning, Grand Ole Opry member, has had more success than most could ever dream of. Travis Tritt definitely has come a long way since his church choir days.

The song was released in 1991 when Tritt was still dreaming of being a country star while working a regular job and grieving over the demise of his second marriage. Little did he know that the song he played in concert on a whim one night would become one of his career’s biggest hits.

“Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares” was released as the lead-off single to his album It’s All About to Change. The song peaked at No. 2 in both the United States and Canada, becoming one of Tritt’s most popular songs.

The Song Was Released When People Still Put Quarters Into Pay Phones To Make Phone Calls

Written by Travis Tritt himself, “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares” sings of a former lover who regrets leaving him, and now wants to come back in his life once again. However, the song’s main character no longer trusts her because of her actions.

In response, he gives her a quarter and tells her to phone someone else who cares to listen. 

“Call someone who’ll listen, or might give a damn. Maybe one of your sorted affairs. But don’t you come ’round here handin’ me none of your lies. Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares,” the song goes. It was during a time when the population was still putting quarters into payphones to make phone calls.

During Tritt’s interview with The Boot in 2017, he detailed how the song was written during some hard times following his second divorce. Out in the middle of the day, Tritt came home to an empty house. Everything was basically gone, leaving him with one or two pieces of furniture his wife had left behind. 

To make things even worse, someone from the sheriff’s department came knocking on the door to serve him the divorce papers. “I sat down, and I started reading through the divorce papers, and [as] I was reading through them, the phone rang, and it was my soon-to-be ex-wife,” Tritt recalled.

His wife called to say, “You know, maybe I rushed into this too quickly. Maybe we need to think about working it out.” 

Tritt was reading through all of the divorce papers as his wife was talking to him. After the conversation, he thought to himself, “Do I really want to consider getting back together at this point? A lot of water had gone under the bridge, obviously, between when we got together and now. And, do I really want to consider reconciliation at this point?” 

That’s when the lyrics for “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares” came to Travis Tritt. He wrote the song in about fifteen minutes, but he never considered releasing it because he wrote it as “a personal song for me to pick me up whenever I would get depressed over my personal situation.”

Then one night, he thought of playing the song at Billy Bob’s as an opening act. “And so I did it acoustically, and, immediately, the response from the audience was just phenomenal, and I knew we had something that, if we ever decided to release it, was going to be a hit,” Tritt recalled. And the rest was history.

Enjoy Travis Tritt’s incredible performance of “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares” in the video below.