Honestly OK
by Dido

Album: No Angel (1999)
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Songfacts®:

  • Dido is a very confessional songwriter, and on this track she confesses to a feeling of helplessness and loneliness - she doesn't even want to be with herself anymore.

    She wrote the song in the mid-'90s when she was going through a really rough time. After breaking up with a boyfriend and signing a debilitating publishing deal, she holed up in her basement apartment in London and stayed there. Writing songs helped. She eventually found her footing, got out of the house, and moved forward. "Honestly OK" made it onto her debut album, No Angel, in 1999.
  • Dido wrote this song with her brother, Rollo Armstrong, and with the songwriter/beatmaker Matty Benbrook. Rollo had a trip-hop band called Faithless that Dido sometimes sang in. He helped put together her No Angel album. Benbrook also did work with Faithless along with Paolo Nutini and Jack Savoretti.
  • By the time Dido released this song in 1999, she was honestly OK, very happy with her boyfriend Bob Page, who inspired some of the more upbeat songs on the album. She was more than OK at the end of 2000 when Eminem used her song "Thank You" to provide the hook for his track "Stan," and enlisted Dido to appear in the video. Her career took off, and the album ended up becoming the top-selling debut by a female solo artist in UK history.

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