Songfacts®:

• The incendiary title track of Miranda Lambert's 2005 Kerosene album finds the Texas-born country singer turning her back on love after her boyfriend cheats on her. Instead of crying tears into her beer, like many of her male country counterparts, she chainsmokes and indulges in revenge fantasies as her love life goes up in flames. "I'm giving up on love 'cause love's given up on me," she sings.
  
  Lambert, who had a hand in writing nearly all of the songs on the 12-track album, expanded on the theme of being unlucky in love but she wasn't recreating her own failed relationships. "I've loved a lot, and I'm one of those people who love very deeply when I do. I get hurt more easily because I do love so deeply. But all of these songs aren't from experience," she told CMT News in 2005.
• Throughout the song, Lambert entertains fantasies of revenge, or perhaps she's already fulfilled them. She refuses to follow polite society's rules for dealing with a breakup, and makes her own with kerosene and matches: "Light 'em up and watch them burn, teach them what they need to learn."
  
  In the fourth verse, she claims she no longer hates her ex because "you can't hate someone who's dead" and she's left holding a smoking gun, with plans to pin her crime on his lover-turned-wife. "I'll find somewhere to lay my blame, the day she changes her last name," she threatens.
• The music video, directed by Trey Fanjoy, follows the betrayed singer on the trail of revenge as she totes a can of kerosene to burn down her cheating boyfriend's house. Fanjoy went on to helm most of Lambert's videos, including the one for "Wranglers" (2004), which once again finds the singer dabbling in pyromania as she sets fire to her ex's jeans. The clip even features a replica of the gas can and the same matchbook from "Kerosene."
• Lambert shares songwriting credit with alt-country singer Steve Earle on "Kerosene," but the pair didn't sit down together to write the song. Lambert gave Earle credit after listeners noted the melody and structure of her song sounded a lot like Earle's "I Feel Alright."
  
  "I didn't purposefully plagiarize his song," she told No Depression magazine in 2007, "but unconsciously I copied it almost exactly. I guess I'd listened to it so much that I just kind of had it in there."
• Lambert issued a self-released, self-titled album in 2001, but Kerosene is her first major-label album. The singer got the attention of Epic Records while competing on the first season of the reality singing competition Nashville Star in 2003, where she finished in third place, and signed a record deal the following year. Travis Howard, one of her competitors on the show, co-wrote a few of the tracks on the album.
• "Kerosene" was released as the album's third single and it was the most successful, peaking at #61 on the Billboard Hot 100 (her first entry on the all-genre chart) and #15 on the Country chart. The album also marks the first of seven consecutive #1 albums on the US Country Albums chart, with the last being 2019's Wildcard.
• Lambert was allowed to choose her own producers for the album. She picked Frank Liddell because she liked the work he did for Jack Ingram and Chris Knight on the former's 2002 Electric album and the latter's 1998 self-titled debut. She also chose Mike Wrucke, who continued to team up with Liddell on many of her projects, including her sophomore album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2007).
• The song earned Lambert her first Grammy nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance at the 2007 ceremony. She lost to Carrie Underwood for "Jesus, Take The Wheel."