Songfacts®:

• Sometimes we keep going back for more of something that's not good for us. We think it will be different this time, but it's always the same thing.
  
  Most of Marian Hill's songs are sung in character, but "Same Thing" is a personal one for their singer, Samantha Gongol, who was dealing with one of these sticky relationships:
  
  Never want it to end
  But it's still the same
• In a Songfacts interview with Marian Hill, Samantha Gongol talked about what inspired the lyric. "I was breaking up with someone who I'd been with for a really long time and it was the first relationship that I had ever felt that I couldn't really get out of," she said. "I'd always prided myself on knowing if something's not right, then you leave, and it's clear cut like that. This was the first time I realized that it's not so easy, and I kept feeling myself going back and back over and over even when I shouldn't. Part of getting older is that you realize life is more complicated."
• This was included on Marian Hill's debut album, Act One, which contains the hit "Down." Their producer, Jeremy Lloyd, put in some chopped vocals on "Same Thing" like he did on "Down," but kept the mood more understated, with stretches where the song goes almost to silence. This production style isn't far off from what Finneas did with Billie Eilish, who was emerging at this same time. Lloyd and Finneas are friends and colleagues; in 2017 Lloyd remixed the Billie Eilish track "Bellyache."
• The Marian Hill duo were never a couple, which gave them perspective on each other's love life. Lloyd knew Gongol's relationship was going nowhere, but was powerless to stop it. "Me as your friend was hearing you say over the course of a year, 'I should probably break up with him,'" he told her in their chat with Songfacts. "It was just never happening. So I was like, please, it's just going to be the same thing."