Songfacts®:

• This song finds Lucy Dacus detailing a day she shared with a friend and her friend's father during her freshman year of college. The dad had mistreated his daughter throughout her life, and while her friend keeps nervously smiling, Dacus pictures her thumbs on his irises, "pressing in until they burst."
• Dacus wrote the song during a 15-minute drive to dinner in Nashville. She said what happened was significant, but something she hadn't thought about for years. Like most songs she writes, she wasn't expecting it and it made her feel "weird, almost sick."
• Dacus first performed the song a month or so later while on tour with Boygenius, her project with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. Her bandmates encouraged her to share it with the audience and Dacus continued to play the tune during her shows. "I knew I wanted a long time to get used to playing it since it made me feel shaky, so I ended sets with it for about half the shows I played in 2019," she said.
• The song became such a favorite from her live performances that it even had its own fan-run Twitter account. Dacus released it as a single on March 9, 2021.
• Lucy Dacus helmed the song with her regular producers, Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore, plus a member of her backing band, Jake Finch.
• Lucy Dacus released "Thumbs" as the lead single from her Home Video album. When Uncut magazine asked her about the album title, she replied: "Documentation has always been a big part of my life whether in video, photo or song. I was born right around that time my parents got their first camcorder and my dad was constantly taking videos right from when I was a baby."
  
• Dacus dropped a full-band version of the song titled "Thumbs Again." The reworking replicates how the track is performed live, adding to the instrumentation an electric guitar, synthesizer, and resonating percussion.
• In the lyrics, Dacus tries to reassure her friend that she doesn't owe her father a relationship just because they're related. "You two are connected by a pure coincidence bound to him by blood, but baby, it's all relative," she sings. Dacus needed to hear the message just as much as her friend did. She was adopted at birth and grew up placing more importance on the concept of chosen family over blood ties, but her biological father had different ideas.
  
  "My birth father really does believe in the bonds of blood, and we don't tend to understand each other," she told Pitchfork in 2021. "There's a language barrier there - he's from Uzbekistan - but he doesn't really respect my boundaries. I wonder a bit if he just doesn't understand them."
  
  By the time she wrote the song a few years after the meeting with her friend's dad, she was in the midst of complicated issues with her own birth father. "When I wrote the song, I was speaking to the friend: 'You don't know him, even if he said you did.' But then I said it back to myself and realized I needed to hear that, too," she continued. "I don't have to play any particular role, even if he and his family are expecting that from me. A part of me wants to be able to do that, but it's just really intense, and it's not something I'm familiar with. All in due time, it's OK if the time isn't right now or ever, but it might be in the future - it's up to me."