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WEBMISTRESS speculates:
Can you say "self-indulgent"? Maybe some frustrated songwriter with an encouraging friend somewhere in the world can relate to it, but the rest of us roll our eyes and fast forward to the next song. It's my least favorite on the album, the only one I really can't stand. It's about her conversation with Tom Petty where she asked for him to write a song for her as he did with Stop Dragging My Heart Around and I Will Run to You, and he basically told her to get down to business and write her own material. And she did...although in this song she still gets some help on the musical end!
BRIDGET speculates:
I think everyone's just too hard on Stevie, I mean there is all the pressure of being totally famous and obsessed over!!! It must be kinda hard to find real friends when you're that big. I think that by making Stevie write her own songs her friends were making her stay original. If they wrote a song for her and she was like "woah I like this song" she might start writing in their style instead of her own. Maybe she realized it too. She was probably just like wow I really do have friends. I mean, she's allowed to be grateful, isn't she?
DERICK speculates:
I think that this song was written as a nostalgic song for Stevie. I remember reading a quote from Stevie talking about her music in her earlier career. To her, her own written material was one of the most valuable things in her life. Songs written by people other than her felt foreign to her. Early on, she felt uncomfortable singing other people's songs. Inevitably, almost every songwriter branches out. In the case of Stevie, the change from her own self-reliance to partial dependence on others can really be noticed at the peak of her drug abuse, and the subsequent prescription to Klonopin. Almost every song of hers had the tag of another songwriter. During the depression which followed Stevie's Klonopin treatment, Stevie was probably used to turning to the inspiration of others to create her music. In the case of "That Made Me Stronger," Stevie expresses the conversation that led to her affirmation that her old self-reliant spirit was not dead. I feel it's a bit of a look back on when she first began her musical lifestyle. The Webmistress used the term "self-indulgent" with a negative connotation, but I feel that it's important for every person sometimes to take a step back and recognize his or her own own affirmation. "That Made Me Stronger" is Stevie doing so in a musical sense. Many people find it hard to empathize directly to it...but I really don't feel that is the point of the song.