Songfacts®:

• Detroit-born blues singer Janiva Magness weathered many storms in life - losing her parents to suicide, enduring the foster care system, becoming pregnant as a teen, overcoming addictions - but she emerged strong as steel. Her 16th album, Hard To Kill, takes its name from this mercurial track, where she boasts about how nothing and no one can keep her down - not even the Prince of Darkness. "I'm bad business for the devil 'cause I'm so hard to kill," she sings.
• Magness attributes her steely disposition to a long line of strong women in her family, particularly her maternal grandmother, Pearl. The singer, who wrote the tune with Australian songwriters Andrew Lowden and Lauren Bliss, explained in a Songfacts Podcast interview.
  
  "She was very, very strong and she married and 'divorced.' I'm using the term divorce with quotes around it because I don't think she actually legally divorced him six times - swear to God. My maternal grandfather was a bit of a piece of work. And so she'd kick him out or he would just abandon my grandma and my mother during the Depression, very difficult times. But the bottom line is my grandma was strong as steel and that was what I said to [my co-writers]."
• I went off that cliff and I landed in a tree
  I been so used to losin' there ain't nobody more surprised than me
  
  When Magness belts the above lyrics, she's not getting metaphorical about the nature of survival. She really did go off a cliff and land in a tree. The singer told Songfacts the story:
  
  "I was probably 18 or 19 years old. I was really inebriated. I was super, super drunk. I was walking around the top of this cliff in Duluth, Minnesota, with some friends and it was like two in the morning, and we were like, yeah man, and boom I went off the cliff. My first thought was, okay, this is it, fine, it's over, thank God, we're done. And I landed in a tree, broke my wrist, and my friends were at the top of the cliff going, "What are you doing down there!?" It was just an absolute cartoon episode."
• The line, "Echo Bodine said the spirits are watching over me," is a reference to the spiritual healer and author Echo Bodine, who was a popular fixture on talk shows in the '80s thanks to her psychic claims.
• This opens with a nod to another powerful female figure in the music industry: Tina Turner (and her hit "Proud Mary") - "Big wheels keep on turning, just like Sister Tina sang."
• Lowden and Bliss also co-wrote "When You Were King" and "Standing" with Magness for her 2014 album, Original.