Songfacts®:

• This is the first single and title track from Melissa Etheridge's 11th studio album. When AOL's Spinner asked Etheridge about the impetus for this song, she replied: "When I first sat down in January, I really started working on the songs. I knew I would be recording in July and I wanted to give myself months to really bring this together because the whole concept of the album is just that everything in our lives comes down to fear and love. There are only two vibrations in the world and you're either making a love choice or a fear choice, so the working title of this album was 'Songs of Fear of Love.'"
  
  Etheridge added: "As I started writing these songs, my older kids said 'Mom, what are you going to call the album?' I said 'Songs of Fear and Love' and [my daughter, Bailey] said, 'It's too many words, mom.' I said, 'Okay, How about 'Fearless'?' and she said 'Taylor Swift album. Why don't you say 'Fearless Love'?' So 'Fearless Love,' that's kind of perfect, but I have to write a song for that now. I think she said that in the morning, I dropped her off at school and I came home and I wrote this song."
• The song's first line is "I was 17, you kissed my lips." Etheridge explained to Spinner the inspiration for that lyric: "It was the first time I kissed a girl. I try to put my own experiences in my songs, of course, and yet have them remain universal. It was intense going through that experience and having the fireworks go off: 'Oh my God, this is greatest thing ever! This is what all my girlfriends have been talking about when they kiss boys' and stuff. I was like, 'Hmmm I don't feel that' and then all of a sudden I felt it and I had to keep it in to myself. It will eat you up. It's horrible to have to put a lid on something."
• Etheridge explained to Spinner the lyric, "You are what you are afraid of." Said the award-winning singer-songwriter: "That's what I'm trying to push forward in this song. I am what I am and we all are. We are exactly what we are: what we look like, we feel, that's what we are. We take that and become whatever we are afraid of. If you take that on and say, 'Oh I'm afraid of this' and it stops you from doing, then you become what you are afraid of."