Songfacts®:

• This song by British singer-songwriter Jessie Cornish, who performs under the name of Jessie J, was used in the third installment of the Step Up series, Step Up 3D.
• Jessie J explained the song's meaning during an intimate show at The Sofitel's Stone Rose on November 2, 2010. She revealed, "I kind of lost myself. It's very personal. It's about being true to yourself. Don't lose yourself in any situation you're put in, and do the dew."
• Jessie wrote this self-help ballad at the end of a lonely three-month trip to Los Angeles when she was 20. Having been shunted from studio to studio with various producers she was ready to pack it all in. She told The Independent December 10, 2010: "I'm very much someone that lives to be happy. It's not just about the parties and I know so-and-so – I'm not that girl. So I looked in the mirror and started to cry and said 'who am I?' Music is my therapy."
• Jessie J wrote this song with Toby Gad and Shelly Peiken; Gad also produced the track. In a Songfacts interview with Peiken, she talked about the session: "Jessie knows what she wants, and she knew how she felt that day. Something really peculiar happened: When I opened up my journal to write that day, the first title that was listed of the things I might throw out for that session, was the title 'Who You Are,' but she threw it out first like she read my mind or my journal, so she ran with it.
  
  When you're writing with someone like Jessie and you have someone like Toby Gad on an acoustic guitar - and he is an incredible, emotional player who comes up with extremely tasty progressions and inversions and voicings - and you have someone like Jessie who knows what she wants to say and she's got ingredients and she's got words, you have to give them space. I threw a word in, a phrase in here and there, and I was certainly in the room and part of that energy, but I wasn't going to be as assertive with myself as I would be for an artist that wasn't really a writer but was in the room because they wanted their name on the song. So, she just put it out there and we helped decorate it - she's pretty amazing."
• The song was included on Jessie's debut album Who You Are. She explained to The Sun why she chose this as her title track: "This song saved my life musically. The day before I wrote this song I was ready to give up music. It's amazing how three-and-a-half minutes of melody and lyrics can change your life and I'm so happy that not only has it saved my life but it's saving other people's. That's why my debut album is called Who You Are."
• Jessie has a lyric from this song - "Don't lose who you are in the blur of the stars" - tattooed on her hip. Except "lose" is spelled "loose" because that's how she wrote it out for the tattoo artist, and he didn't mention it. She was just 18 when she got it, and like many of us, didn't really know the difference between "lose" and "loose."
• The video shows Jessie sitting on a chair in front of the camera as if it was her mirror in a bedroom. She was forced to be immobile having ruptured several tendons in her foot during rehearsals for the Capital Radio Summertime Ball. As Jessie begins to sing the final bridge, water begins to drip in front of her face and she wipes a drop from under her eye, as if she was crying. The clip was inspired by the one for Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U."
• The song's co-writer, Shelly Peiken, wanted to title this song "Blur Of The Stars" from the line, "Don't lose who you are in the blur of the stars." She was outvoted.
• The song's co-writer, Toby Gad, recorded a new version of the song with The X Factor winner Louisa Johnson that was released in 2024. They made a video for it at Metropolis Studio in London, where Queen did a lot of their recording. "I think she's killing it," Gad told Songfacts. "She has such a beautiful voice, and she made this song her own."