Songfacts®:

• The first single from LeAnn Rimes' 14th studio album, Spitfire, chronicles her 2009 film-set romance with her Northern Lights co-star, Eddie Cibrian, when both were already married. "I carried the title around with me for about eight months, because I was so unsure of how to write it without offending anyone," Rimes told journalist Katie Couric of the song. "I had to be so honest in order to write it... I call myself 'pathetic' in the song because that's exactly the way I felt. It was just a pathetic situation. It's like, 'LeAnn, how did you get yourself into the situation?' Then there's this other side of me going, 'I love this man with all my heart and he loves me, and this is so complicated.'"
  
  Rimes and Cibrian were married in 2011.
• Rimes wrote this song with her producer, Darrell Brown, and the songwriter Dan Wilson, best known as lead singer of Semisonic and co-writer of Adele's hit "Someone Like You." He wrote about the song in a book to accompany his 2017 album Re-Covered, on which he recorded a new version: "We got together at LeAnn's place. She has a piano in her living room and some comfortable chairs and couches. I brought my guitar. That's all you'd ever need. We had a very funny and also poignant conversation before we started writing.
  
  LeAnn had began her career at a very young age and had grown into full-fledged pop stardom with grace. But now she was dealing with a lot of public controversy around her recent divorce and remarriage, and the collision of public life and private love is not easy. Lyrically, I like to go for the sore spot in a songwriting session. So it seemed like we had our subject matter. But then LeAnn said something really sweet and beautiful about kids. She was talking about her stepkids and saying, 'I can't think of them as mine, only borrowed.' Almost as if they're on loan from God or nature. That idea really struck me: you don't own people in your life, you're just borrowing them. It's a temporary arrangement."
• Another Spitfire track, "What Have I Done," was supposed to be the first official single but this song was released to radio first, due to an overwhelming fan demand.
• Rimes debuted the song on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno on December 18, 2012. She explained to the chat show host that despite being borne of a specific situation, the tune has a universal theme. "This song, the chorus says, 'I don't want to give you back,'" she said. "A lot of people who haven't been in this situation can relate because there's got to be a relationship in their lives - romantic or not - that it just kills to give it up. It's a very intimate look into a very rough moment in my life."
• X Factor Extra's Terri Seymour caught up with Rimes backstage after she sung on the show's second season finale. When she asked the singer about Cibrian's reaction to this song, Rimes replied: "He is always so supportive, I actually was scared to put him in the song because it does talk about how we both hurt each other. There was a moment where we did have some hurt between the two of us that we had to accept and get over and move forward and that's made for an amazing relationship."
• According to Rimes, the idea for the song initially came to her during an emotional airplane ride. After noticing a woman reading a tabloid with the country singer on the cover, Rimes started to cry and the woman's husband comforted her. "I honestly feel like that guy was an angel," she told Billboard. "Some things came over me at that moment and I just remember thinking that title ('Borrowed') to myself." Then, the song's first line, "I know you're not mine, only borrowed," popped into her head. When she got home, she brought the idea back to her co-writers.
  
  She added: "It's a very honest, authentic moment and capturing a piece of me that I really didn't know existed until I wrote this song."
• Rimes re-recorded this as a duet with Stevie Nicks for Rimes' 2018 EP, Re-Imagined, which featured new versions of some of her older songs. When Nicks got wind of the project, she expressed interest in recording "Borrowed" as a duet because she'd admired the song for a long time. "It was very easy for me to try to be in that same sad, deeply tragic, passionate place where she was when she wrote that song because I had been there. I had lived there for a long time," she told The Associated Press.
• Surprising no one, Brandi Glanville, Cibrian's ex-wife, announced she was not a fan of Spitfire. "She's not going to win any fans by writing a song about breaking up a family. No one wants to hear you cry over getting everything you wanted," The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star told In Touch magazine. Rimes shot back and told Good Morning America, "I have a right to share my happiness and my failures like everybody else."