Lian about the song: “This song was born very spontaneously. A guy that reviewed my song “If You Ever Leave Me” on his podcast reached out to me and asked if I wanted to topline a beat that he had. I started writing it thinking it was going to be for someone else, but I couldn’t help but fall in love with what I wrote.
I had this note on my phone that said “I should’ve said it. Should’ve said in the the donut shop. In that bar we went to. Laying in your bed. In that park in the valley…” and a bunch of other places. I was seeing someone at the time, and I kinda… fell in love. But I just couldn’t say it to him. Then we fell out of touch, and I remember driving home and replaying all these times I could’ve said something over and over again. Maybe if I said something and wasn’t so scared, things would have been different. Then I wrote this note and haven’t touched it ever since.
When I got this beat, I started going through my notes and found this one. And then the song just wrote itself.
Basically, this song is telling a story about this relationship. I wanted to bottle this feeling of falling in love, meeting someone great, not being able to resist it, seeing red flags and ignoring them, and then just messing it all up.
Sonically, I wanted it to sound very ambient, ambiguous, overly emotional. Like you can physically feel how much I am hurting and how much I regret not saying anything. The huge part about this song is background vocals. I probably had 60 tracks of just harmonies. I wanted them to scream, I wanted them to create this big choir-y sound, bring out all of the emotions that I was feeling.
Hands down my favorite and also most important part of the song is the bridge. Mrs Taylor Swift tough me a few things about writing a bridge, and she is a really big inspiration of this song. I wanted this bridge to grow from very tender almost whisper-y vocals into this roaring, screaming, explosive entrance into the last chorus. Every time I listen to that part of the song I swear I want to cry.”