Welcome to Annotated, a new feature just for A+ subscribers where a bunch of our favorite musicians will take us on an intimate journey through the creation of one of their songs. When we last met, Margaret Cho was walking us through her heartfelt, hilarious tribute to Anna Nicole Smith. This month, we have brilliant songwriter and forever friend of Autostraddle Jenny Owen Youngs, here to walk us through the anthem for every single one of my breakups, “Fuck Was I.”
“Fuck Was I,” annotated by Jenny Owen Youngs
I wrote “Fuck Was I” in between my junior and senior years at SUNY Purchase. I was home for the summer, working at a record label during the day and waiting tables at night. My free time was spent going to shows, writing songs, making out with cute people whenever possible, and whipping around aimlessly like an emotional pinball. I bounced off figurative walls (and literal humans) with reckless abandon, cycling rapidly between the thrilling high of romantic possibility and the dreadful low of that possibility being repeatedly squashed. The bad news was that I felt sad and lost and useless and unlovable A LOT during this period. The good news was that all this heightened emotional activity affected my creative output like the songwriting equivalent of MiracleGro.
Love grows in me like a tumor
Parasite bent on devouring its host
I’m developing my sense of humor
Till I can laugh at my heart between your teeth
Till I can laugh at my face beneath your feetSkillet on the stove
It’s such a temptation
Maybe I’ll be the lucky one
That doesn’t get burnt
What the fuck was I thinking?
I remember sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom after one ill-fated amorous encounter came to its inevitable, eviscerating conclusion. I was fingerpicking through the chords that would become “Fuck Was I,” writing lyrics out longhand as they took shape in my brain. I favored yellow legal pads at the time — the extra long kind, for maximum lines-per-page.
I pretty much wrote the whole song in one sitting; I think it took another day or two to fine-tune the third verse. It’s very rare for me to write a song all at once, but this one just sort of poured out of me.
When we got back to school for the fall semester, I played a show on campus and performed the song in front of people for the first time. Everyone I had dated or made out with (or even thought about making out with) in the past year thought it was about them. At the time, I was certain they were all wrong — except, you know, one of them. But looking back now I can see it really was about each of them, about me, about the experience (and sometimes futility) of trying to connect to other people. “Fuck Was I” was less about one specific split, and more about a whole web of rips and tears and sutures and staples — wounds that I endured and doled out in equal measure.
Love plows through me like a dozer
I’ve got more give than a bale of hay
And there’s always a big mess left over
With the “What did you do?”
And the “What did you say?”
“What did you do?”
And the “What did you say?”Skillet on the stove
It’s such a temptation
Maybe I’ll be the special one
That doesn’t get burnt
What the fuck was I thinking?Love tears me up like a demon
Opens the wounds, then fills them with lead
And I’m having some trouble just breathing
If we weren’t such good friends
I think that I’d hate you
If we weren’t such good friends
I’d wish you were deadSkillet on the stove
It’s such a temptation
Maybe I’ll be the lucky one
That doesn’t get burnt
What the fuck was I thinking?What the fuck was I thinking?
What the fuck was I thinking?Love is so embarrassing
I’m in this awkward and uncomfortable thing
I’m running out of places to hide it
I’m running out of places to hide it
What the fuck was I thinking?
I recorded my first album during my last year of college. Thanks to some luck and good timing, “Fuck Was I” was used in the season 2 premiere of Weeds and got spread around a bit online. It became a sort of calling-card song for me, which was fun at first… but it became increasingly less fun as I grew away from the behavior patterns that inspired the song in the first place.
As my career developed, I started spending more days each year on tour than I did at home. In Pittsburgh and Oslo and Santa Fe and Manchester, I played that song every night, and every night I felt a little less connected to it. I had stumbled into a mild paradox: singing the song for which I was best known made me feel… not like myself.
Eventually I decided to take the song out of my setlist, which felt like the equivalent of Carly Rae Jepsen omitting “Call Me Maybe” from her live show (if Carly Rae Jepsen was a relatively obscure indie singer/songwriter from New Jersey with a penchant for grandiosely comparing herself to wildly popular top 40 artists).
Time passed (as it does) and my feelings changed (as they do) and the tethers linking me to my hangups about this song gradually disintegrated. These days I usually include it in my live shows. Sure, it uses the word “fuck” like a battering ram in a medieval siege. Sure, I’m not the same person I was when I wrote it. But I think the key here is that I got far enough away from that version of myself that I was able to foster compassion (in place of self-loathing and exasperation) for Jenny 1.0, which re-opened a door into this song for me. Now I can appreciate this portrait of the artist as a young melodramatic romance-fueled starter queer.
Stay tuned for lots of new incarnations of Annotated, featuring exclusive photos and mementos from the origins of our favorite artists’ favorite songs.
