Songfacts®:

• "'Hero' is one of those rare songs that came to me all at once," Lissie told Drowned In Sound of the country anthem. "I was at my old house in Ojai, California one evening just getting some things done around the place and it poured out of me! I'd been thinking about duality, Schrödinger's cat, parallel realities and just this general idea of being simultaneously a huge success and failure and what I want my life to look like. Shortly after I bought a farm in NE Iowa, and between tours I am living there!"
• The singer told Interview magazine more about the song's background: "There was a time in my late teens and early 20s where I was motivated by this wanting to get out, to prove to the world that I had something to offer -that kind of youthful spirit, where maybe I had my eye on fame and fortune. I mellowed out in my late 20s and now that I'm in my early 30s, I'm coming to peace with it. My priorities have really changed. I'll always want to play and share my music with as many people as I can, but the emphasis is more on how do I find a happy place, what's my balance, what's my ideal? Sometimes people think, 'You don't get to have it all, you don't get to be happy, life's a struggle,' but what if it's not?
  
  I was toying with the idea of ambivalence a lot. It's something I work on, not being so invested in outcomes and being more engaged in the process of my life. 'Hero' is about knowing what you want to see happen, but being somewhat ambivalent and not being caught up in outcomes, because it's really almost the same thing, it's all someone's opinion. Whether I'm a hero or a zero doesn't really matter. It's all perception."