Songfacts®:

• The lead single from Christina Perri's second album is a power ballad that she wrote with Boys Like Girls frontman Martin Johnson. The latter also produced the track, one of several singles that he helmed in 2013 - Jason Derulo's "The Other Side," Daughtry's "Waiting for Superman," Avril Lavigne's "Here's To Never Growing Up," and Gavin DeGraw's "Best I Ever Had," were some of the other tunes where he manned the boards.
• The song is an emotionally charged ballad which finds Perri singing,
  
  "Your words in my head
  Your knives in my heart
  You build me up and then I fall apart."
  
  Perri then declares in the chorus,
  
  "I'm only human
  And I crash and I break down."
  
  Rather than singing about a relationship with a man, Perri is actually reactiing to the grind of the music industry. "I remember writing a song at 6 pm on a Wednesday, and then having to do it again the next day at 6 pm," she told Billboard magazine. "It was difficult, and I had hit a wall. So instead of not writing songs, I wrote a song about feeling like I couldn't write one. Of course, people think it's about a guy."
  
  The song was released on iTunes on November 18, 2013, and Perri debuted the song live with a performance on The Queen Latifah Show the same day.
• The video was directed by Elliott Sellers, who also helmed Perri's "Distance" and "Something About December" clips. It starts with a tattoo-less Perri as a robot sitting in a white room, with close-ups of the mechanics working inside of her body. We see the singer transform from a machine into a human and her inkings reappear as a symbol of her individuality. It took Perri over three hours to cover all her markings. She tweeted: "Fact: It took 3.5 hours to cover all my tattoos for the video. As soon as they were gone, I missed them. I like who I am #human."