Songfacts®:

• "Medicine" is a gleefully sarcastic kiss-off to a two-timing ex recorded by Megan Moroney for her third album, Cloud 9. It's built on the playground logic of "what goes around comes around," only here the playground has neon beer signs and a jukebox that probably still has Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" rattling around somewhere in its wiring.
• The premise is deliciously petty in the most entertaining way. Moroney responds to a cheating ex with itemized reciprocity. If he vanished for three days without texting, she'll go five. If he handed his number to an LA blonde, she'll pass hers to a quarterback. If he hated the little black dress, well, it's going out tonight, and if it ends up on the floor it won't be in his apartment.
  
  It's revenge measured in carefully portioned inconvenience, like a country cousin to "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette, though with less screaming and more sly smiling.
• The chorus revels in the role reversal:
  
  Oh, poor, poor you
  Now, who's the fool?
  Say I'm messing with your head again
  Well, how you like the taste of your own medicine
  
  Suddenly it's him with the messed-up head, and Moroney who's holding the prescription.
• The detail in the lyrics strongly suggests real-life inspiration, and Moroney has said she writes entirely from her own life, but she has not publicly identified who, if anyone, "Medicine" is about.
• Megan Moroney wrote the song with Jessie Jo Dillon, Jessi Alexander and Connie Harrington.
  
  Jessi Alexander is a long-established Nashville hitmaker with credits including Miley Cyrus' "The Climb," Morgan Wallen's "Don't Think Jesus" and Luke Combs' "Ain't No Love in Oklahoma." Connie Harrington has written for Brantley Gilbert, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and many others. Pairing those two veterans with Moroney and Dillon gives "Medicine" its finely calibrated mix of honky-tonk wit and structural punch.
• "Medicine" arrived so early in the writing process that it nearly gave the entire album its name. Moroney told SiriusXM's The Highway that she briefly planned to call the record Medicine because the song made her feel she could "build a world around that." Eventually she opted for Cloud 9, explaining to Apple Music that the new title better reflected where she was emotionally. "I was just in my career, in my personal life, like I was just, I could see where Cloud 9 was and I knew that I was way above it."
  
  A title called Medicine would have pulled the album in a sharper, more vengeful direction; Cloud 9 signals the hard-won happiness underpinning even its fiercest moments.
• Placed early in the Cloud 9 tracklist, "Medicine" serves as one of the album's most mischievous moments. Moroney described the project as a tonal shift, still containing the occasional "emo cowgirl" confession but overall lighter and more playful.