Songfacts®:

• Over racing '80s synths, Mitski demands more affection from both a love interest and her audience.
  
  I need you to love me more
  Love me more, love me more
  Love enough to drown it out
  
  Because Mitski doesn't love herself, she needs the approval of others to engulf those parts of her she dislikes. As she pleads for "love enough to drown it out," the synthesizers nearly drown out her voice.
• While Mitski wrote the song before the COVID-19 lockdowns, some of its lyrics became more poignant in light of the quarantine.
  
  If I keep myself at home
  I won't make the same mistake
  That I made for fifteen years
  I could be a new girl
  
  Lyrics like "If I keep myself at home" took on a new meaning during the COVID era. "I kept them on the album because I found that some of the sentiments not only remained the same," she explained, "but were accentuated by the lockdown."
• Mitski wrote the synth-pop song with her go-to producer, Patrick Hyland, for her 2022 record Laurel Hell. Out of all the tracks on the album, "Love Me More" went through the most versions. "It's been too fast, too slow, and at some point, it was even an old style country song," she said. "Finally, I think because we had watched The Exorcist, we thought of Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' and experimented with floating an ostinato over the chorus. As we steadily evolved the ostinato to fit over the chord progressions, we began to hear how the track was meant to sound."
• Mitski wrote the majority of the Laurel Hell songs before the COVID lockdown. She told Apple Music they originally were "more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad."
  
  As the pandemic progressed, Hyland and Mitski took the tracks into a more jubilant direction. "We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful," she said. "We just couldn't stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album."
• Mitski feels she's only wired to do one thing: write songs about her feelings. "Love Me More" is about getting validation from that one skill.
  
  "Please take this sole thing that I'm able to do and please love it," she told The Guardian. "It is very desperate, and when you're desperate you don't have much time or space to think about how embarrassing it is to be desperate."