♪ Well you done done me in; you bet I felt it ♪
♪ I tried to be chill but you're so hot that I melted ♪
♪ I fell right through the cracks ♪
♪ Now I'm trying to get back ♪
♪ Oh, I won't hesitate ♪
♪ No more, no more ♪
♪ It cannot wait ♪
♪ I'm yours ♪
"I'm Yours" feels great.
It never gets old playing it 'cause it feels like me.
Wrote during the "Mr. A-Z" recordings,
which was the summer of 2004.
And it was written so quickly and so joyfully
that I thought it was something that I might save
for a children's record one day.
I equated it to like a nursery rhyme.
I don't know why that is.
I think because it was written in such primary colors.
It wasn't originally written as a love song,
it was written more out of this just joy of singing,
close my eyes and singing to the great unknown.
And to that higher power saying, "Make me an instrument,
I'm yours."
And I was actually playing an electric guitar.
A lot of people think I wrote it on an ukulele
on an island somewhere.
But I was home.
And I had visited Jamaica and I had visited Hawaii
in previous months,
so I was influenced by the islands.
And I was just chugging around on some Bob Marley chords,
and just letting myself be,
surrendering to the higher creativeness
of our artistic selves.
♪ I'm yours ♪
And luckily, I wrote it down as it was happening.
I was tickled by the song.
But it wasn't enough to put it on "Mr. A-Z."
I just, I put it aside, thinking this is cute.
And in 2005, we started playing it live,
and "Mr. A-Z" came out and we were touring
and I put my little "I'm Yours" demo on my MySpace page.
It really started to click and connect all around the world.
And by 2007, when I was making
"We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things."
it was obvious to all of us that "I'm Yours" needed a home,
it needed a birthday.
So we recorded it for that album,
doing our best to just copy the original demo.
So it was the little love song that...
It just revealed itself one summer afternoon in 2004.
I'd put it out in 2008 and it just went to the moon,
and it's continued to delight and tickle me.
♪ I've been spending way too long ♪
♪ Checking my tongue in the mirror ♪
♪ And bending over backwards just to try to see it clearer ♪
Yes, I have checked out my tongue in the mirror,
plenty of times.
I don't know why I would do that,
but it found its way into my song.
The song is about letting go and trying not to be
in my own way while I create something,
while I sing something, while I hand myself over.
It's about ultimate surrender.
And in that verse, vanity is something
that gets in my way or gets in anyone's way.
Do I look okay?
You know, is everything okay?
Is my shirt all right?
Is my hair fine?
And so that verse was like, look,
I've just been looking at myself way too long.
It's time to throw vanity aside
and just go with the flow,
go with whatever season it is today.
♪ And it's our God-forsaken right to be loved ♪
♪ Loved, loved, loved, loved ♪
The song came out of my own southern vernacular.
In the second verse, it's like,
"It's our God-forsaken right to be loved."
Which is weird.
It's like, I'm almost cursing in saying
"We have a right to be loved."
Not even understanding fully
what God-forsaken right even meant.
But it's just part of my vernacular
to have kind of turned that phrase really quickly.
And so when I hear other songwriters covering it,
I'm perplexed, because the song is so
deeply in my vocabulary.
And in a way it kind of represented to me,
or it proved to me that the more personal the song is,
the more universal it can actually become,
because the humanity really speaks through
a personal song.
♪ I'm yours ♪