Songfacts®:

• This defiant love song pairs Goulding's distinctive vocals with a carefree verse from rapper/singer Swae Lee of Rae Sremmurd.
• The rap-pop tune finds Goulding crooning about a lover who is fueling her fire.
  
  I don't wanna be somebody without your body
  Close to me
  And if it wasn't you, I wouldn't want anybody
  Close to me
  
  The song was released not long after Goulding announced her engagement with Sotheby's art dealer Caspar Jopling.
• The song was released just under three years after Ellie Goulding's third album Delirium. During the gap between that record and this song, she dropped a few one-offs such as her contribution to the Bridget Jones's Baby soundtrack, "Still Falling for You" in 2016 and her 2017 collaboration with Kygo "First Time."
• "Close to Me" features synth-heavy production from Diplo. Goulding and the American producer previously teamed up for "Powerful," a track on Major Lazer's Peace Is The Mission album.
• Goulding told BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac that she wrote the song in LA in early 2018. "We always wanted to work together on something but we couldn't figure out what," she said of Diplo. "This was the perfect track for him and he was really in love with it. So we got together on it and then we tried to find, basically, the perfect kind of companion with me for it."
  
  The English songstress added: "And then Swae Lee popped up, and as soon as I heard him do his verse on it, I was like, 'Yeah, this is perfect.'"
• The song started off with a guitar part Goulding was playing around with at a Los Angeles studio with producer Savan Kotecha. The English singer recalled to Billboard that the genesis of the song's tempestuous love story came when she started singing "don't let me down."
  
  Asked what inspired the lyrics, Goulding explained that Kotecha "gets very overwhelmed with what's happening, particularly in America," and the pair decided they needed to escape for a while and "write something a bit silly." So they came up with "a song about a turbulent, probably doomed relationship - someone to forget the world with."
  
  Goulding decided there was something missing so she sent their demo on to Diplo. "I could tell he was massively into it, because he sent it back pretty much straight away," she said, "He must have worked on it all night."
  
  It was Diplo who then suggested that Swae Lee could contribute a verse.