Where Were You?

Album: Delicious Surprise (2005)
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Songfacts®:

  • Singer/songwriter Jo Dee Messina likens this song to Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" in that everybody thinks it's about somebody different. Jo Dee is someone who deals with life straight on. She's not one to sit back and let things happen without consequence. In this case, that consequence is this song, which she says is autobiographical. She laughs when she talks about the fuss it caused over people's interpretations of who it is about.
    The truth of the matter, straight from Jo Dee, is "Delicious Surprise took forever to come out. Took like 3 or 4 years for that record to get released because of silly things going on at the record label. Well, we had just come off a couple of huge albums, and then we hit this pause. And during the pause, my phone stopped ringing, and I couldn't get in touch with people that were supposedly my friends. And I had called a friend of mine, left a couple of messages, never heard anything back. And it was like, You know what? Where were you when I needed somebody?"

    "Then we come back with 'My Give A Damn's Busted,' and it was a great success, and people start calling, and I was like no, no, no, no, no - wait a minute, when I needed a friend, where were you then? You didn't even return my phone calls. So there's a lot of angst in that song, yes." (Read more in our interview with Jo Dee Messina.)

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