Songfacts®:

• "Who I Was," NF's collaboration with Machine Gun Kelly for his Fear EP, feels like two men sitting in adjacent therapy chairs, taking turns unpacking their emotional luggage. NF's earlier tracks like "Leave Me Alone" were exercises in self-examination, but "Who I Was" is the moment he invites a guest to help sift through the attic boxes.
• Built as a conversational exchange, the track finds both artists wrestling with the ghosts of their former selves. MGK enters first, revisiting the death of his father, broken relationships, and a restless spiritual hunger. Raised in a Christian missionary family, MGK once projected a kind of tattooed atheistic bravado, but here he raps about spending decades hiding from God and being welcomed back like a prodigal son.
  
  NF's verse confronts old patterns of anger, emotional withdrawal, and the childhood wounds he has explored since Therapy Session. But this time he isn't just worried about himself, he's worried about his kids. He admits, with the same bluntness that made "Let You Down" unforgettable, that his greatest fear is passing those unresolved storms down the line.
  
  What unites MF and MGK is the tug-of-war between the past ("who I was") and the emerging self. Both men recognize that their scars are historical documents they can't shred, but they can, perhaps, reinterpret.
• Produced by NF, Jeff Sojka, and Aaron Chafin, the track leans heavily on a repeating finger-picked acoustic guitar line that feels like it wandered in from an MGK "My Bloody Valentine (Acoustic))" session and decided to stay. MGK's verse sits on that guitar figure, while NF's sections build outward with piano and atmospheric pads. Compared with his early orchestral bombast, this arrangement is almost minimalist, a reminder that sometimes the quieter songs cut the deepest.