Songfacts®:

• This duet between Elton John and Charlie Puth features both artists singing of finding true love. Both had given up on finding love until their romantic partners came into their lives.
• John and Puth birthed the collaboration in early March 2020 when they bumped into each other in a Los Angeles restaurant. They had never met before but both are big fans of each other's music; John had supported Puth's records on his Apple Music Rocket Hour show. They struck up a conversation, and when Puth learned the music legend lived nearby, he invited him to visit his home studio.
  
  John had paused his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour because of the COVID pandemic, so he was now stuck at home. One afternoon he was kicking his heels, so John popped over to Puth's place, where he found he had a setup with keyboards, synths, and Pro Tools. Puth recalled that the "Rocket Man" hitmaker sat down at his Rhodes keyboard and immediately played what turned out to be the melody of "After All." Puth quickly penned the lyrics and they wrote the entire skeleton of the song in about 15 minutes.
• Speaking to Apple Music, Elton said this was an unusual songwriting experience because he generally writes to lyric (his main song writing partner and lyricist, Bernie Taupin, normally sends him the words to which John composes the music). "After All" is one of the few songs on which he wrote a melody first. "God knows how it happened," said John. "I don't question how it happened, but lucky enough, I was with him (Puth) and he just finished it off."
• Puth not only had a hand in collaborating on the writing of the soulful ballad, he also produced, recorded and engineered it entirely.
• When Elton penned the track, he wasn't thinking of recording an album. But as the pandemic carried on, other one-off projects kept cropping up and he ended with a selection of diverse collaborations. He collected the songs together and released them as The Lockdown Sessions.
• Charlie Puth wrote the lyrics to "After All" about Elton John's relationship with his husband David Furnish. He recalled in a chat with the British piano legend and Ladbible talking to David when he said, "after all that I knew that I was the perfect manager and perfect partner for Elton."