Songfacts®:

• This track is about a spiteful former girlfriend trying to tempt Charlie Puth to come back to her rather than move on to someone new. However, the singer is all too aware that his ex is just looking for attention and isn't interested in a permanent relationship.
• Charlie Puth produced the track himself and co-wrote it with Jacob Kasher (Cobra Starship's "Good Girls Go Bad," Maroon 5's "Sugar").
  
  "When I came up with the song originally, I was on this hotel bed in this really cool room in the Philippines," he told Genius. "I think back about the time when I was in that hotel room and she was literally crying to me about how mistreated she was by her ex—had me thinking that I could be the guy who could fix her. Like, girls are crazy. They're amazing and crazy at the same time."
• The song's music video was filmed in Los Angeles and finds Puth as the object a near fatal attraction. The female lead is played by Australian actress Samara Weaving, who is known for her role as Kirsten Mulroney in the BBC TV series Out of the Blue and for playing Indi Walker on the Australian soap opera Home and Away.
• Charlie Puth told Billboard magazine regarding the song's origin, "I was reading someone's Instagram and [he] had poured [his] heart out about this girl. I think [he was] trying to convey some sort of message, like 'I've moved on and I'm a guy and I'm strong.' But what I got from that was, 'Wow, this girl completely played you and this girl just wanted attention.' And I just started singing, 'You just want attention.'"
• The song was released as the lead single from VoiceNotes, an album title that celebrates the smartphone app Charlie Puth used to get song ideas for his new album while on the road.
  
  "VoiceNotes, the name comes from that little app on your phone," he explained to US breakfast show Today. "I'm not really good at writing down music, I just have it in my head and it (recording the ditty) needs to be immediate for it to work, so when I came up with 'Attention,' I was on this train in Tokyo and... I had this in my head and I couldn't get my laptop (out) and make the beat real quick (sic), so I just (performed it in a beatbox style to remember it).
  
  I wanted it to be this like, kind of disco-y thing, and then I went back to my hotel and made the beat and listened back to the Voice Note (recording). So every song on this album is made from a Voice Note."
• Voicenotes is an album that is largely about Charlie Puth's struggle to find a normal relationship now he's a well known artist and the anxiety that pursuit has induced. "I wanted it to be a story of my travels from the East Coast to the West Coast and how my growing fame has affected my mind in good and bad ways," he said.
  
  This song and the two follow-up singles —"How Long" and "Done For Me" — cover that territory. "Whenever I met anybody, they often knew more about me than I knew about myself," Puth said. "I'd never dealt with anything like that before."