It was a slap in my face how quickly I was replaced.Īre you thinking of me when you fuck her? I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner.
It was inevitable, then, that Alanis Morissette’s vitriolic 1995 song “You Oughta Know” (from her huge-selling third album, Jagged Little Pill) would trigger gossip about the identity of the ex-lover savaged in the lyrics for moving on so quickly:ĭid you forget about me, Mister Duplicity?
When Mary MacGregor hit the charts with “Torn Between Two Lovers” in 1976, for example, far too many fans assumed she must really have been involved in relationships with two different men at the same time (even though the song was not written by MacGregor, but was in fact was penned by two men, Peter Yarrow and Phil Jarrel), and listeners spent years trying to guess whom Carly Simon had in mind when she wrote “You’re So Vain.” (The latter perhaps fostered by the trend that began in the 1960s of pop musicians’ writing their own material rather than relying upon the efforts of commercial songwriters.) A segment of the modern audience insists on interpreting the lyrics of pop songs written in the first person literally (see the legend about Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” for a prime example) and assuming that the accounts described therein must reflect the personal experiences of the singers.