Songfacts®:

• Throughout his life, George Ezra has had repeated distressing thoughts. He would compulsively think of the worst thing he could say in any given situation, then have that thought again and again.
  
  While recording his second album, Staying At Tamara's, Ezra learned about Pure O, a form of OCD that involves intrusive thoughts. He instantly recognized that's the reason behind his self-sabotaging habits. "I Went Hunting" is about the singer's discovery that he has Pure O. "I think I've always known I had it but without the vocabulary," he told The Sun. "Then there's a kind of eureka moment where someone says, 'Oh, there's a word for that.'"
• The song title comes from a symptom of Pure O.
  
  Ooh, I went huntin'
  Ooh, found a problem
  
  Part of Ezra's condition is that once he looks for a problem, he will discover one. "If you want to find a reason that it's been a bad day, you'll find it," he told Apple Music. "But then, on the flip side, I could sense that something wasn't right, and I owed it to myself to turn the room inside out and try and find out what it was."
• In verse 2, there's a lyric that some have misheard, much to Ezra's frustration.
  
  Imagine havin' a thought and then thinkin' it again
  Thinkin' it again, thinkin' it again
  Thinkin' it again, thinkin' it again
  
  They think he's singing "Imagine having a daughter."
  
  "I'm genuinely gutted," he said, "because I thought it was such a clear record and now I'm like, 'You've f---ed it.'"
• Ezra recorded "I Went Hunting" for Gold Rush Kid. It comes at a point on the album where there's a shift in feeling from the bangers in the first half to more introspective material. "A calmer feeling," he said, "it's almost as if you can hear me figuring things out in real time."
• Ezra wrote the song with his longstanding producer Joel Pott. Ezra played guitar while Potts contributed guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, piano, drums and background vocals. Ezra's touring bassist Jimmy Sims played bass, and London based multi-instrumentalist Tobie Tripp arranged the strings.