By: Melanie Selvins
There comes a point in a songwriter’s life when the past stops being material and starts becoming evidence.
Jeremy Parsons has reached that point with “Who Was I,” a deceptively easygoing country-Americana song about being 25 years old, believing you know something about the world, and discovering years later that you barely knew yourself.
Parsons doesn’t romanticize the younger man. That’s the first thing that distinguishes the song. At 25, he remembers himself drifting, getting high, sleeping through daylight and coming alive at night. There was music somewhere in the equation, and there was ambition, but there was also the aimlessness that young men have been confusing with freedom since approximately the beginning of time.
His parents, meanwhile, had followed another road. House. Family. Education. Faith.
Parsons looked at that model and decided it wasn’t for him.
He wanted to sing.
That decision is where American music mythology usually takes over. The kid packs a bag, goes to Nashville, suffers nobly, gets discovered, and proves everybody wrong.
Parsons did go to Nashville.
The rest didn’t happen.
He eventually moved back in with his father at 32.
That’s the kind of detail most singers leave out of their biographies. Parsons builds a song around it.
The history matters because “Who Was I” didn’t originate as some grand autobiographical statement. Parsons says it began after reading a review of his third full-length album, Things To Come. A critic complained that the record didn’t reveal enough about his life. Parsons initially treated the criticism almost as a dare: You want personal information? Here you go. But somewhere in the writing, the joke disappeared, and something more useful emerged.
That’s often how good songs happen. The writer starts out trying to prove one thing and discovers something else.
Musically, “Who Was I” knows enough to stay out of the story’s way. Acoustic textures, restrained country twang, and a steady rhythm give Parsons room to speak plainly. Other reviews have noted the song’s warm guitars and understated arrangement, and that’s precisely the right setting for this material.
There is no need for a production team to underline the important parts.
Parsons already did that with the details.
Twenty-five.
Nashville.
Thirty-two.
Dad’s house.
And then comes the question around which the entire song revolves: “Sometimes I wonder who’s chasing who, me or the dream.”
That’s a songwriter’s line.
Not because it’s clever, although it is, but because it changes meaning depending on where you are standing. At 25, chasing the dream sounds heroic. At 35 or 45, you may begin wondering whether the dream has been chasing you, dictating where you live, how you make money, which relationships survive, and what you’ve sacrificed to keep going.
There are thousands of people in Nashville who could sing that sentence.
Few would sing it this plainly.
Parsons is a Texas songwriter, and there is something recognizably Texan about his refusal to make a big show of the confession. The best Texas writers have traditionally understood that you don’t have to explain every emotion if you’ve chosen the right detail. Give listeners the room, the person, and what happened. They’ll figure out the heartbreak themselves.
“Who Was I” operates that way.
What Parsons doesn’t do is almost as important as what he does.
He doesn’t condemn his younger self.
He doesn’t congratulate his older self.
And he certainly doesn’t turn the song into one of those dreadful inspirational lectures where every wrong turn was secretly necessary because it led to success.
Sometimes a wrong turn is simply a wrong turn.
Sometimes you learn something anyway.
Parsons has said that enough time had passed for him to look backward without being quite so hard on himself. That perspective is essential to the record. “Who Was I” isn’t a confession looking for absolution; it’s an older man finally capable of observing the younger one without needing to either defend or prosecute him.
That also explains why the song sits so naturally within Parsons’ Life EP. The record circles time, growth, empathy, and mortality. Americana Highways called “Who Was I” the project’s standout and noted that its vulnerability helps it connect beyond Parsons’ own biography.
That’s exactly right.
Because eventually the particulars disappear.
Maybe you never went to Nashville. Maybe you never moved back in with Dad. Maybe you weren’t getting high at 25.
But almost everybody eventually encounters some younger version of themselves and wonders who that person was.
The strange thing is that you’re still carrying him around.
Every stupid decision. Every impossible plan. Every night you should have gone home earlier. Every person you loved badly. Every opportunity you missed. Every dream that turned out differently from the advertisement.
They all came along for the ride.
“Who Was I” understands that growing older isn’t necessarily about defeating the person you used to be. Sometimes it’s simply about developing enough distance to recognize him.
Parsons has survived his twenties, survived Nashville’s indifference, survived the detours, and kept writing songs. There’s no victory parade waiting at the end of this track, and it wouldn’t belong there anyway.
Instead, there is gratitude.
Not gratitude because everything worked out perfectly.
Gratitude because he got far enough down the road to look back.
That’s a considerably better country song.
