Songfacts®:

• "No Excuses" finds Meghan Trainor taking a man to task for not treating her properly.
  
  Why you acting like you never met a lady?
  I don't disrespect you, don't you disrespect me
  You must've confused me with someone else
  There ain't no excuses, babe
  Your mama raised you better than that
  
  Trainor said, "I love how so many women are standing up for what's right. I wanted to write us all a powerful anthem. Sometimes, people talk down to me, because I've only been doing this for four years, so I wrote this song... it's all about equality and being kind."
• Trainor told People the upbeat, sassy track was one of the last songs she wrote for her third album. "It was just a personal experience I had," she said. "It just reminded me we need more respect in the world, and we need more respect for each other at every age."
  
  Trainor added: "As a 24-year-old woman talking to older people who have been in the business for longer than I have been, I'm just confused: How are you not respectful in this situation right now? I have little cousins in school and I hear their stories, and I'm like, 'Oh, you're supposed to treat others the way you want to be treated.' And I think we're losing that a little. Especially right now."
• The lyrics for the short two-and-a-half minute song were inspired by the #MeToo and Time's Up movements. "Mansplaining is very real. It's like, you don't realize you've had those experiences until you look back," said Trainor. "You feel like you're fighting for your word, fighting to show them you do know what you're talking about. I finally reached a point where I needed to write a song about it."
• The pastel-colored video finds Trainor clad in a selection of '90s-appropriate looks:
  
  "I'm still living in the '90s! Those are my favorite colors of all time," she said. "I'm just a big turquoise and coral kind of girl. Everything you see in that music video was from my Pinterest. And we had a short amount of time to get it together because I wrote this song at the last second and they were like, "This should be the first single!" So I had a couple of days to get my life together. My choreographer and creative director were like, 'There should be three of me' because we don't want it to be a big, crazy music video that's too preachy - we just want to let the song sing for itself and be cute and let them know, with a wink, we have a message here."
• The song was influenced by Aretha Franklin's 1967 hit "Respect." "I didn't walk in that day being like, 'I have the song title, it's No Excuses,'" she explained to Genius. "I was asking everyone. Everyone in my family. Everyone on my team, 'How can I write about respect?' Like a modern day version of R-E-S-P-E-C-T. How could I bring that back and not sound cheesy and angry and mean?"
• Meghan Trainor said during a Facebook Live Q&A that her older brother Ryan, her mom, and her then-fiancé (now husband) Daryl sang backing vocals on this track along with "this sweet guy named Matt, who was in the room at the time." She added, "every clap you hear, that's my family and my managers."
• Trainor had the concept for the song before she went into the studio, so she texted her songwriting partners, Jacob Kasher Hindlin and Andrew Wells, to give them a heads up. "Hey, I want to talk about respect and respecting each other but in a cool pop modern way."