Songfacts®:

• Perri declares, "I'm setting fire to the life that I know," on this defiant track. She wrote the song in England with the singer-songwriter Kid Harpoon, whose other credits include Florence + the Machine's "Shake It Out," Calvin Harris' "Sweet Nothing" and Foxes' "Let Go For Tonight."
• The songwriting session with Kid Harpoon almost didn't happen as Perri was burnt out toward the end of her UK trip and didn't want to be dealing with another potential single. "I hit this gnarly point where I stopped having good experiences," she told Billboard magazine. "As a writer, I know you have to write sh---y songs to write good songs too."
  
  "But the night before my last day, it was 4 AM and I was in a place where I just didn't like music anymore, and I didn't want to go," Perri continued. "My manager said, 'Can you, for me, go up in your pajamas and at least show up?' So I go and I sit down and I said, 'If I hear the word 'single' one more time, I'm going to throw up.'"
  
  After taking the tired songstress for pizza, Harpoon convinced her to return to his studio, and the song was birthed in just twenty minutes. Perri said: "We stayed up all night that night finishing it, and I remember thinking 'this is it!' It was a whole new sound for me, which I'm really excited to grow into."
• A major theme running throughout the Head or Heart album is change. This song is about Perri's decision to move from her home in Philadelphia to Los Angeles to follow in the footsteps of her older musician brother Nick Perri, the former lead guitarist of Shinedown. "I don't know where you get that type of courage. It's something that has to happen inside of you. I was 20-years-old and it was the week before my 21st birthday and my brother said, 'Move to California,' and I said, 'OK,'" she recalled to Radio.com. "A lot of times our dreams aren't where we grew up. We have to go find them… I would not stop until my life was burning gold, which I think it is now."