Songfacts®:

• In this song, Hailee Steinfeld has it bad for a guy who brings out desires she didn't know she had:
  
  I didn't know that I was starving till I tasted you
  Don't need no butterflies when you give me the whole damn zoo
• Steinfeld got together with the Los Angeles-based production duo Grey and the German-Russian DJ Zedd to record this song. "Zedd and I have been friends for a while now, so we've been wanting to collaborate," said Steinfeld. "He called me up, and said he'd just finished a track he wanted me to hear. I rushed to the studio and immediately fell in love with the song."
  
  "The next day he introduced me to Grey, and we began recording right then and there," she continued. "We knew we had something special, because it all happened so fast and with such ease. It was so fun, and pretty amazing, to have this chance to work closely with friends who are so immensely talented. We couldn't be more excited about it."
• The songwriter Asia Whiteacre wrote "Starving" with the production duo Noise Club (Rob McCurdy and Chris Petrosino). "It was actually our first time ever writing together and the song played hard to get, for sure," she told Songwriter Universe. "I remember we almost didn't record it at the end of the session because it had been a rough day; we only had 15 minutes left in the studio, and I think we were too tired to realize what we had written. We ended up cutting it though - I jumped in the booth and sang the demo through three times and we called it a day. About a month later they sent me a very clean, good-sounding, simple vocal guitar demo saying, 'we tried going in on production with this, but it felt best acoustic.' This was great because Katie Vinten (at Warner/Chappell Music) was able to send it out to a few DJs and the next day Grey asked for the stems. Three days later they sent back an almost finished demo saying they wanted it for their first single and we we're like, 'uh yeah this is f--king rad.' Grey is signed to Zedd, so he got involved and Katie got the song to Charlie Walk (President of Republic Records) and Hailee, and it all happened very fast. The song was out a month later and my life hasn't been the same since. In the best way."
• It's not uncommon for actresses to cross over into pop music, but usually they're Disney stars like Sabrina Carpenter or Olivia Rodrigo. Hailee Steinfeld's star turn as an actress came when she was 13 in the 2010 movie True Grit, a dusty Western that most fans of her music probably haven't seen. She switched lanes for her role as Emily Junk in Pitch Perfect 2, released in 2015 a few months before she issued her debut single, "Love Myself." Steinfeld made more music over the next few years, landing her biggest hit with "Starving," which endures as her most popular song. She was doing just fine as a singer but started getting roles in major movies like Bumblebee and The Marvels, so she put her music on hold, mostly releasing one-off singles.