Garth Brooks’s 1991 number-one hit “Unanswered Prayers” was inspired by a chance meeting with his high-school sweetheart while visiting Oklahoma with his first wife, Sandy Mahl, in October 1989. The encounter made him realise that the relationship he had once wanted was no longer right for him, reinforcing the song’s theme that disappointments can later prove beneficial.

Brooks described the song, from his album No Fences, as the truest he had written. He co-wrote it with Pat Alger and Larry Bastian; Brooks and Alger had struggled to find a central hook until Bastian suggested the title and the line, “some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers”. The recording remains one of Brooks’s most popular songs.