By: Cole Harper
There’s a dangerous moment in adulthood when the person you were at 25 stops feeling like you and starts feeling like some reckless bastard whose memories you somehow inherited. Jeremy Parsons lives inside that uncomfortable distance on “Who Was I,” a candid piece of Americana self-examination that understands nostalgia is a hell of a lot more interesting when you don’t airbrush the stupid parts.
The San Antonio-born songwriter has spent much of his career turning autobiography into something larger than autobiography. His earlier Things to Come album was already preoccupied with experience, addiction, growth, and the strange business of becoming someone you didn’t necessarily expect to become. Parsons has said that record was an exercise in putting his past “under a microscope” and connecting his own experiences to universal ones.
“Who Was I” turns the microscope up another notch.
Ironically, the song exists partly because somebody complained Parsons hadn’t revealed enough. After Things to Come, he encountered a review suggesting the album offered insufficient insight into his life. Parsons’ reaction was essentially: You want personal? Fine.
What began as a mischievous response became something far more revealing, a song Parsons describes as a reflection on his journey, what he didn’t know when he was younger, and the knowledge accumulated along the way.
The result is three minutes and 35 seconds of anti-mythology.
Parsons doesn’t introduce his 25-year-old self as a young troubadour heroically sacrificing everything for art. He remembers a guy getting high, sleeping through daylight, and pushing his luck hard enough to wonder how he survived it. Meanwhile, his parents had already assembled the respectable adult starter kit: house, children, education, and Jesus.
Parsons wanted none of it.
Or, more accurately, he wanted something else badly enough to accept whatever instability came with it.
That’s where “Who Was I” becomes considerably more interesting than another country song about misspent youth. Parsons isn’t bragging about the partying, nor is he delivering a recovery-room sermon about it. He’s examining the person who made those decisions and recognizing that the foolishness and the ambition weren’t entirely separable.
Then comes the song’s killer idea: “Sometimes I wonder who’s chasing who, me or the dream.”
It’s a brutal little question because anyone who has spent years pursuing an artistic career understands it. At first you chase the dream. Eventually the dream acquires its own gravity. You’ve sacrificed too much to quit, invested too much to turn around, and incorporated the pursuit so completely into your identity that you’re no longer certain who you’d be without it.
Parsons made it to Nashville. He didn’t “make it all,” as the song dryly acknowledges. Then, at 32, he moved back in with his father.
Try finding that line in the average Music Row empowerment anthem.
This is where Parsons’ Texas singer-songwriter instincts distinguish him from the motivational sludge surrounding so much modern country. Failure isn’t edited out of the biography because failure is the biography. Moving home isn’t the end of the story. It’s simply where the road went next.
And Parsons’ road did continue. His official biography documents a career that eventually brought international audiences, more than 1.5 million Spotify streams, charting singles, a 2024 New Music Awards Country Breakthrough Artist of the Year honor, and a finalist placement in the New Folk Competition. “The Garden,” another song from the Life project, reached No. 45 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart.
That success makes “Who Was I” more poignant, not less.
Because Parsons isn’t writing from the perspective of somebody declaring, See? I showed everybody. There is remarkably little triumphalism here. He’s more fascinated by the sheer unpredictability of surviving long enough to discover where your choices lead.
That theme runs throughout Life. Songs like “Tickin’” contemplate time; “The Garden” considers growth; “Humanity” turns Parsons’ observational eye toward the world around him; and “Life Worth Dyin’ For” asks whether the accumulated experience amounts to something meaningful. “Who Was I” is the project’s cracked rearview mirror.
The song also demonstrates Parsons’ greatest strength as a writer: he doesn’t require extraordinary circumstances to generate emotional stakes. There’s no murder ballad, divorce courtroom, or cinematic outlaw mythology here. The drama is simply realizing you got older.
And somehow that’s enough.
By the final return to the central question, Who was I at 25?, the answer matters less than it did at the beginning. Parsons was reckless. Ambitious. Lost. Certain. Clueless. Probably all of those things simultaneously.
In other words, he was 25.
“Who Was I” isn’t really about wishing he could go back. It’s about recognizing that every embarrassing, exhilarating, misguided version of yourself had a hand in building whoever woke up this morning.
Jeremy Parsons doesn’t forgive his younger self because the song never puts him on trial.
He simply looks across the years at that wild-eyed kid chasing a dream and seems almost amazed that they’re still traveling together.
