Songfacts®:

• Jason Reeves is best known for his songwriting partnership with Californian singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat, which was the foundation for Caillat's hit albums Coco and Breakthrough. Reeves also records his own material and this song is the lead single from his album, The Lovesick. (Check out our full Jason Reeves interview.)
• Reeves explained the meaning of "Helium" to AntiMusic: "This song is a fairytale set on fire. It is a daydream lit by the brightest sunbeam on earth. And I was madly in love with at least the idea of love when I wrote it, seen hiding in the eyes of the ghost of a gorgeous girl. I always write when I'm burning alive. Whether it's in pain or bliss or bewildered confusion. The idea of having helium hearts is a very simple but hopefully powerful metaphor for the way falling in love seems to lift us up and away from the madness of this world. To a place where everything is as surreal and mysterious as it ever could be. It's as if we're floating up into the sky away from a city that is being engulfed in silence by flames.
  We're looking down at the beautiful chaos and disintegration knowing that we figured out how to escape. Just barely in the last possible perfect moment. And I hope for this song to give people that feeling of floating up towards a light and away from any sort of darkness. Every song is real and is inspired directly from the most tumultuous and fragile of all my emotions. My songs are rare survivors from a battlefield that changes every war. They are gifts found drifting on the wandering wind. And I feel like I'm only reflected in the pool of each one of them like an illusion that could be lost. This song is for love and its miraculous potential to heal and save and revive our hearts again and again."