You Get Me

Album: The Spirit Room (2001)
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Songfacts®:

  • "You Get Me" is a track from Michelle Branch's first major-label album, The Spirit Room, released when she was just 18. It's a song about finding someone who understands you and accepts your quirks. In a Songfacts interview with Branch, she said: "My favorite thing about the lyrics of 'You Get Me' is, especially at the time being a teenage girl, it was saying, 'I'm different, and you embrace the differences in me, and I don't have to fit in the mold to be accepted by someone.' I think that's a really important message for younger people. But as I've grown older I've come to really appreciate the lyrics in a totally different way."
  • Branch wrote most of the songs on The Spirit Room by herself or with her producer, John Shanks, but "You Get Me" was written by two outside writers - Shelly Peiken and Abra Moore - and then tweaked by Branch and Shanks. Peiken had written the Christina Aguilera hit "What a Girl Wants," and Moore had a minor hit of her own in 1997 with a song called "Four Leaf Clover." Branch and Shanks changed the second verse, which Branch recalls having lines about mashed potatoes and ice cream.

    "It's one of my favorite songs lyrically, and a lot of that is because because I had nothing to do with it," she said. "I heard it and immediately fell in love with it."
  • This was used in the 2002 movie The Hot Chick, where Branch makes an appearance playing a club DJ. It also plays in the movies Van Wilder (2002) and What a Girl Wants (2003).
  • "You Get Me" was the first song Branch released from the 2021 20th anniversary edition of The Spirit Room, where she re-recorded all the tracks. The song was issued with its own lyric video.

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