Songfacts®:

• This song finds Calvin Harris singing about getting away from a stifling situation. The release of the surly dance-pop track on September 16, 2016 followed Harris' split from Taylor Swift. It left fans speculating that the lyrics refer to the breakup with his ex high-profile girlfriend, particularly the chorus, where Harris sings, "You were the one thing in my way."
  
  However, Harris dispelled the rumors that he was shading Swift by explaining it had been several years in the making:
  
  "It's breaking out of a situation," the Scot revealed during a radio interview with Elvis Duran and the Z100 Morning Show. "I thought of the concept years ago, when I left Safeway. I was trying to move to London and I was working in the store in Scotland, I was trying to go on and make music for a living but I couldn't because I didn't have any money. I was like, damn this grocery store! If I could break out of this I could have enough time to work on music and get good."
• It was around 2003 when Calvin Harris moved down to London, so it took him a long time to complete the track. "It's hard to get a job in my town. You get brainwashed into thinking that's as good as you're going to get, and then you have to realize that actually there's a whole world out there," he explained. "When you're stuck in that situation, you can't see that. You don't think that you're going to become anything! That was just the concept that was in the back of my mind, but I had no idea how to put that into words until very recently."
• Unusually, this features Calvin Harris singing rather than a guest vocalist. He explained on BBC Radio 1's Breakfast Show: "Sometimes the vocal just suits the track. I was trying to think of who to replace the current vocal with but sometimes you get all the emotions and the character across with a certain type of voice. I think it just suited the song really well."
  
  Harris also sang on his tracks "Summer" and "Feel So Close."
• Speaking with Zane Lowe on Beats 1, Harris commented, "I always said if someone asks me what the song sounds like, I say, it's an exact middle ground between Frank Sinatra and Fetty Wap, its right in the middle."
• Calvin Harris was bored by "My Way," and his lack of enthusiasm for the cut resulted in his Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 album. "I wasn't really excited about that song for the first time in 11 years," he told Zane Lowe. "I was like, 'All right, something's wrong here.' So eventually I come up with the idea of a funk album with everyone that I've always wanted to work with."