Songfacts®:

• Ingrid Michaelson writes simple songs that pack a punch, which makes her a perfect fit for TV shows that want to amp up the emotional intensity of a scene. Despite earning several spots on Grey's Anatomy's soundtrack, like "Keep Breathing," Michaelson hit a wall writing "Build It Up" for the Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere (2020).
  
  "I was making it about me," she said of her initial efforts. Once she restarted from the perspective of the characters, it took just 15 minutes to write. Based on Celeste Ng's 2017 novel of the same name, the dramatic series, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, follows the intertwined lives of two families living in suburban Ohio in the '90s. Michaelson's song plays over the pivotal final scene in the closing episode, "Find A Way."
• In a 2020 interview with Backstage, the singer explained how the song came together:
  
  "The idea of the song came right out of the brief they gave me about the concept of this show: motherhood, and what makes the mother, and the idea that Mia [Washington] says in one of the earlier episodes, the slash and burn technique of farming, where you have to burn down the crops to let the soil get fertile, to regrow. There's that push and pull between these two women [Washington and Reese Witherspoon], along with race and class and what many white people right now are coming to grips with, which is living in a society that obviously caters to white people. The show highlights that in many ways and doesn't necessarily vilify Reese Witherspoon's character, but it's glaringly obvious when you're watching it unfolding in front of you. I wanted the song to reflect that concept of just fighting for your life, and maybe that means destroying everything to be able to grow stronger - it'll get burned down so you can build it back up again. You don't want to have a song about burning things up in a show where there's lots of fire. I wanted it to feel like an extension of these women."
• Michaelson's lyrics were at odds with the poem Mia's daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood), reads in the scene. Showrunner Liz Tigelaar, who personally asked Michaelson to contribute the tune, made the decision to use an instrumental version for the scene and save the full version for the closing credits.
  
  "You were being pulled by these two amazing different expressions of art," she explained in a 2020 interview with Variety. "The song was fighting the poem."
  
  The singer was unaware of the change until she viewed the episode and wondered where her vocals went. She recalled to Backstage: "So I hear my piano part being played and the whole scene happens and I’m like, 'What? I'm so confused,' and I was disappointed. But then the end titles start and it was just like, 'Wow, this is 100% where the song goes.'"
• Michaelson earned her first Emmy nomination when this was nominated in the Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics category at the 2020 ceremony. Labrinth's "All For Us" from Euphoria won.
• Michaelson counts herself lucky that her simple approach to lyric-writing resonates with TV viewers because she couldn't be more complex if she tried. And she's tried. In a 2024 Songfacts interview, the pop singer-songwriter explained why her meat-and-potatoes method of writing works for her.
  
  "I've tried to be wordier and more complex and it's hard for me. I remember in college, so many years ago, I had one professor, probably English, who said, 'You've got such great ideas, you just cannot expand on them,'" she recalled. "You know, you'd have to write a 10-page paper. I'd be typing in the biggest font I could find, I'd make the margins smaller. I'd double space, anything I could do to make it fit those ten pages. I have really smart thoughts and really interesting base thoughts, I'm just s--t on expansion. So that's why songwriting became so great for me. I'm like, 'Oh! Three minutes? I can repeat things? Chef's kiss!' I'm not meant to write a book but I was born to write pop singer-songwriter music for sure."