human

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."