Songfacts®:

• Camila Cabello chronicles the highs and lows of love during this stripped-down piano ballad.
  
  Loving you was dumb, dark, and cheap
  Loving you will still take shots at me
  Loving you was sunshine, but then it poured
  And I lost so much more than my senses
  'Cause loving you had consequences
  
  Cabello sees the song as the follow-up of the relationship portrayed in "Never Be the Same." She said: "I feel like 'Consequences is the aftermath of a love that was intoxicating like that and hard to get out of your mind or the kind of the love that you compare to everybody else and it's not the same."
• This was one of the first songs that Cabello worked on for her Camila album. She started work on it in the first week of January 2017 and redid the vocals seven times over the next 11 months. She said:
  
  "I re-did it so many times because I wanted it to just capture it. And I feel like the song is a way of letting people in, if that makes sense."
• Amy Wadge co-penned the song with Nashville tunesmiths Nicolle Galyon and Emily Weisband. The English singer-songwriter is a frequent Ed Sheeran collaborator, most famously his hit single "Thinking Out Loud," and it was Sheeran who acted as the middle man between Wadge and Cabello for "Consequences". She told Music Week:
  
  "(I) played it to Ed and he said, 'You know who you need to send this to?' So he sent it to her [Camila], she worked her magic, wrote a bit as well and that's how it came to life. He's always got my back, he's a very generous soul and he always listens to everything I do. He's incredibly generous like that."
• Camila Cabello released an orchestral remix of "Consequences" as her final Camila single. This version of the song was produced by Emile Haynie (Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, and Bruno Mars). "It would be playing it safe for me to make a song that sounds like Havana or another uptempo song," she said. "But to me, my goal is to challenge myself by not doing what feels predictable or obvious, to do things that excite me, and give you the most honest representation of who I am through music."
  
  The singer added that her intention for the release was to tug on people's heartstrings. "No matter what this song does, I wanted to close this era finishing on a song that makes you feel, that makes you think about someone you loved and lost, that makes you think about what it's like to love someone so deeply," she said.
• The moody, autumnal video was directed by Dave Meyers ("Havana"). The director also co-wrote the treatment with Camila. The clip co-stars Dylan Sprouse (The Suite Life of Zack & Cody) as the singer's ghost ex.
  
  "My videos are pretty much what the inside of my brain looks like," Cabello explained. "This is what it looked like in my brain while I was trying to move on."
• Nicolle Galyon recorded a stripped-down version for her 2022 debut solo album, Firstborn. She also laid down a rendition of another previously released song that she'd co-penned, Lee Brice's "Boy."
  
  "Those were two songs that over the years as I played them at writers' rounds, they just felt different," Galyon explained to American Songwriter. "They felt more me, and it seemed like people really connected to those songs in a different way than they did when the artists sang them. I felt like it was maybe the same words, but it was a different story with me retelling it. So that's why 'boy.' and 'consequences.' made the record."