Songfacts®:

• After the spectacular failure of her first major-label release, Y Kant Tori Read, Amos felt defeated. At the same time other new female singer-songwriters such as Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge were being embraced. Amos explained to Rolling Stone how in this song she internally debates what path she should follow. Said Amos:
  
  "It's not an aggressive fight. It's an internal fight, that when you need other people's approval, when you walk in a room, you're everybody's - or anybody's - girl. When you don't need that anymore, [it's] because you have an understanding and an agreement with yourself on who you want to be. And when I say 'who you want to be,' that's going to evolve. But at least you've got to get your palette, your paint, your canvas, and say, 'I'm not choosing to tell this story, which is doing anything to have success.' I don't want that kind of success.
  
  ['Girl'] was being clear with myself that I didn't want that. Didn't need that. Because what I was achieving really hadn't been done in that way, because folk women were being embraced. There was a style for them. But straddling the piano and making the piano a viable instrument with songs being built around it, that was gone since the Carole King days. This was a very different thing because this wasn't the blues/R&B approach. And Kate Bush was much more electronica. And so, I knew then, that I had a big fight ahead of me. And that I couldn't be anybody's; I had to be my own."
• Amos started writing this on an old upright piano at her parents' farm in Virginia. "It's horribly out of tune, which is one of the things I love about it. The chorus was written but that's about it," she explained in the Little Earthquakes songbook. If not for her then-boyfriend Eric Rosse's intervention, however, we never would have heard the tune. "I threw it down on tape and forgot about it," she recalled. "Months later, I was cleaning the house (truly a happening) and was throwing tapes away. Eric intercepted this one out of a pile. I was chopping onions in the kitchen, he brought it in and said, 'Listen' - I did."
• Rosse provided drum and keyboard programming on the track using a Kurzweil synthesizer.