Songfacts®:

• "Dead Man" tells the story of a once-blooming romance that has turned sour. Alessia Cara describes it as "the last final grasp of trying to hold onto what is left of this relationship."
• The inspiration came from Cara's reflections on past relationships that left a significant impact on her. "I feel like I've learned a lot from dealing with situations where the other person wasn't capable of giving their full self," she explained.
  
  The song ruminates on these experiences, comparing the emotional absence to interacting with a ghost.
• Cara co-wrote "Dead Man" with producer Mike Elizondo - a man whose resumé is so wildly varied (Eminem, Fiona Apple, Lauren Daigle) that the recording session could have involved rapping, whispery heartbreak, or a gospel choir. Instead, he built the song on a lively, in-your-face horn section, drawing on what Cara calls "all the music that I loved growing up."
  
  Based on the sound of "Dead Man," this apparently included a fair amount of jazz and brassy theatricality.
• Released on July 19, 2024 as the lead single from Love & Hyperbole, "Dead Man" was Cara's first solo release in three years. She told People the song was a bit of a departure in how she approached songwriting. Rather than writing in the thick of her emotions, she took a step back, treating it as a hindsight perspective. "I had written most of the album and was trying to figure out what the through line was," Cara explained.
• While much of Love & Hyperbole leans into happy, fulfilling love songs, Cara realized she was missing the beginning - the part where love wasn't fulfilling. Because, as she put it, "You can't really feel true love without feeling some sort of loss."
• The music video, directed by George Gallardo Kattah, takes the song's eerie themes and dials them up to dreamlike fever dream. Cara described it as a series of vignettes filled with metaphors about breaking patterns, taking accountability, and "killing the fabricated idea of a person." (Which sounds slightly concerning out of context, but let's assume no actual ghosts were harmed in the making of this video.) The goal, she said, was to create a visual that reflects how most relationship conflicts are actually just conflicts with yourself.