Songfacts®:

• Owen Beverly was just 19 when he released "For Mia" on his 2003 debut EP, The Drunk Lover. Few heard it until 2022, when Rick Beato featured it on his "This Song Should Have Been Massive" YouTube video. Beato was very impressed with the song structure, lyrics, and musicianship, and used the stems from the original ProTools session, supplied by Owen, to demonstrate.
  
  Speaking with Songfacts after the Beato feature garnered nearly half a million views, Beverly said: "I guess one thing that's interesting to point out is that your memory, your recollections, they get colored by your experience. In that case, that experience for me was kind of traumatic. It seemed like so much success was coming my way. When it didn't, it made me not only disappointed, but it felt like it was my own fault. It felt like maybe the music was not good enough. That's to understand that things didn't happen the way I wanted them to. That song in particular was a silly little pop song that I wrote. When I watch the Rick video, I'm like, 'Oh, those chord changes are pretty cool.' I see now there's a lot to that song.
  
  If you'd have asked me a few weeks ago to pick a song that says a lot about me as a writer, I would never have picked that song. But I think it's because that era of time and everything that happened after that EP came out was like a dark night of the soul.
  
  Only now am I able to look back on it and maybe give it the respect it deserves all these years later and give myself a little bit of a break for not being able to control all these uncontrollable things that kept it from being a bigger success."
• Who is Mia? It turns out she's a fictional character.
  
  "I like to tell little stories with my songs, often written in the first person but not autobiographical - more like character studies," Beverly told Songfacts. "In this song, my character is having a Say Anything John Cusack moment in Mia's yard. It's the middle of the night, waking up the neighbors, classic teenage love story."
  
  Say Anything is a movie from 1989 with a famous scene where John Cusack's character stands outside the window of a girl he's after playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" from a boombox. It's an archetype for a grand romantic gesture.
• When this song was first released, Owen Beverly was primed for stardom. He had built up a following in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was a student at the College Of Charleston. A handful of record labels courted him, but nothing came of it and he went into a tailspin. He moved back to Mississippi just in time for Hurricane Katrina, and took work painting houses. He started making music again around 2008, when he moved to South Carolina and released an album called Shooting The Bull. These were the days of blogs and MySpace, so he was able to build a virtual following along with a local one. He ended up working on various musical adventures, eventually forming a band called INDIANOLA. In 2016, he starred in a movie called Solo Project, where he played a struggling singer-songwriter.