As a songwriter, RaeLynn is constantly walking the fine line of getting personal — but not too personal — with her lyrics. With “Me About Me,” from her 2020 EP Baytown, the singer does it by weaving her own character traits into a song about a more universal experience: a one-sided relationship.
RaeLynn co-wrote “Me About Me” with Bob DiPiero and Jeff Garrison, after a conversation with a friend got her thinking about relationships that don’t work out because one person is too self-absorbed. Below, she shares the story behind the song with The Boot, in her own words.
That is one thing that I always struggle with when I’m writing: being sure that it’s personal enough that I can relate to it onstage, but then also fans don’t feel like, ”Oh, obviously this is just about Rae’s life, not about mine.” But I do believe that, you know, we’re all the same at the end of the day … We all have the same feelings; we all go through the same emotions …
So, when it came to “Me About Me,” I knew that I wasn’t the only girl that’s been in a relationship where the guy that you were talking to or dating only talked about himself and never really asked you about yourself. And I feel like, a lot of the times when you’re in those relationships, you don’t even realize it until you’re out of it.
This song actually came from a conversation I was having with my best friend. She was talking about a guy she was talking to, and she’s was like, “God, he’s just so self-absorbed,” and then we were talking about exes, and she was like, “Whatever happened with that relationship?” — we were talking about a past relationship — and I said, “You know what? Well, he just never asked me about me, and everything was on his terms, and it just didn’t work out.”
And I got to thinking about that, and I was like, wow. I know that I’ve been through this, my best friend’s been through this, and I started asking other friends about it … and it was definitely a subject that needed to be talked about.
When I did write it, I thought I did it a little too personal [laughs]. I was like, maybe not everybody cries when their dad leaves … but I was like, you know what, this feels right to me to sing it this way, and then when we turned it in, it was like, oh my gosh, this is special. ‘Cause maybe … it’s when your mom leaves, or maybe it’s ’cause your dad wasn’t in your life. There’s so many things that it could be about that it does relate to everybody.
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