Songfacts®:

• Claire "Grimes" Boucher relocated from rural Squamish, British Columbia, to Los Angeles in September 2015. This song is about her new home. "I got to a place where I didn't need to run away from the entertainment industry anymore," she told Fader of the move. "I just had to do that to make sure I could get to a place psychologically where I wouldn't go insane."
• Though her move to LA marked an acceptance of the need to be close to the heart of the music industry, Boucher still protests on this song at the way the media machine has processed her over the past few years:
  
  I didn't think you'd end up treating me so bad
  The things they see in me I cannot see myself
  When you get bored of me, I'll be back on the shelf
• Grimes told NME that she was "extremely drunk" when she created this hoedown. "I wanted to make a song that is so uncool that no cool hipster people would like it," the Canadian songstress added.
• Speaking to Zane Lowe on his Beats1 radio show, Grimes said, "I wanted it to be a country song but like a dancehall country song."
• Grimes recorded an alternate version of the song that has a slower-building arrangement for the video release. The singer explained that she redid the track, "because when I looked at the footage it was dissonant with the original song."
• The song delves into the challenges of facing public scrutiny and exploitation. Grimes wrote the track with Taylor Swift in mind.
  
  "‘California,' I think I was just doing Taylor Swift cosplay," the musician told K-Pop girl group Aespa in a conversation hosted by Rolling Stone.
  
  "But it's also vaguely about how the media is obsessed with portraying you as this troubled soul or something." Grimes added.
  
  Swift herself has explored similar themes in her own music, as heard in songs like "The Lucky One" and "Nothing New."