I was walking home from the studio on melrose in los angeles on an abnormally cold night for LA. Something about my hands being freezing made me thing of this girl back in Toronto (I’m from Toronto) that I’d thought I was completely done thinking about. I got home that night and started exploring that feeling, and why I had it… the song is my way of trying to figure it all out.

I brought the verses to my producer Ryan Marrone and we started messing with the arrangement. Each verse is approaching my feelings from a different angle. There’s my conscious effort to re-understand myself without this person that my sense of self had gotten tied up with. There’s the nostalgia and frustration for the moments where I couldn’t avoid facing how she was still a lingering part of me and my life. The last verse, which feels the most relevant to me now, is about that crazy feeling of realizing that this girl, who was once the biggest part of my life, only exists for me now as an explanation to someone new for why I have some backwards relationship habits sometimes.

We didn’t figure out the answer to the production right away. It took a number of tries. The emotion of the song felt so specific we really wanted the track to serve that… when the production leaned sad and emotional, it just felt unnecessarily dramatic, but when the production leaned cool and trendy, it felt detached. The core of the track ended up being one full take I played on a synth pad while Ryan was in the bathroom. Some of the coolest intricacies in the sound of that pad just came from me touching random dials on the keyboard to see what would happen. From there Ryan added a brilliantly simple, programmed but organic drum loop, we laid down an indulgent number of backing vocal tracks, and it started feeling really right. Josh Gudwin did a characteristically dynamic mix on the record that I absolutely love, Chris Gehringer took great care of the mastering, and finally we got it there.