Songfacts®:

• Pennsylvania native Lizzy McAlpine studied songwriting at Berklee College of Music before leaving in her junior year to pursue music full-time. She released her debut album, Give Me a Minute, in 2020 to critical acclaim. This is a track from the indie-folk artist's second album, Five Seconds Flat.
• Lyrically, the song finds McAlpine singing about an idyllic young love. It's the kind of unspoiled romance shown in movies where you are so in love with one another that nothing else matters. Throughout most of the song, we think McAlpine is thinking about an actual boyfriend, but there's a twist at the end where she reveals it's not about an actual person; she's just fantasizing.
• The song title comes from its opening lines:
  
  Ceilings, plaster
  Can't you just make it move faster?
  
  McAlpine is waiting for time to go by, watching the ceiling to the point of analyzing structural details. This should have given us a warning she is bored and likely to daydream.
• McAlpine wrote "Ceilings" herself. Ehren Ebbage and Philip Etherington created the country-tinged production.
• McAlpine performed "Ceilings" before the album's release when she supported UK singer-songwriter Dodie in her North America tour.
• The Five Seconds Flat title is a lyric from the album track "Orange Show Speedway."
  
  When you're racing headfirst towards something that'll kill you in five seconds flat
  When I'm racing headfirst towards something that I want back.
  
  McAlpine feels the lyric really sums up the entire theme of the album. "It just means that even though falling in love is terrifying and I've gotten my heart broken in the past, I still want it back because it's beautiful," she explained to Euphoria magazine.
• The song started charting worldwide after TikTokkers used a sped-up version for their videos. Thousands of young women posted clips of themselves wildly lip-syncing to the bridge of "Ceilings" while running down dark streets.
• Lizzy McAlpine's frequent visual collaborator, Gus Black, directed the song's music video. "The 'ceilings' music video represents the seconds after meeting someone you like, where you begin to picture a relationship with them," McAlpine said. "Ultimately, you realize that it doesn't actually exist and it was just your imagination. I think we all do that, it's human nature and that's really what the song is about too."