Songfacts®:

• Post Malone hooks up with Rae Sremmurd's Swae Lee for this song recorded for the soundtrack of the animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The motion picture is set in a universe that features multiple Spider-Men, though the main hero is Miles Morales, a half-black, half-Puerto Rican teen from Brooklyn. Having said that we're not clear what a Spider-Verse is!
• The soundtrack has been billed as "a contemporary musical companion" to the film. It spans multiple music genres, in order "to portray what a teen like Miles is listening to across the country."
• The song has Post Malone and Swae Lee competing for the same girl, whom they call "Sunflower." However, though the two rappers show her a lack of affection, she remains loyal by their side.
  
  I know you're scared of the unknown
  You don't wanna be alone
  I know I always come and go
  But it's out of my control
  
  The sunflower has tough, deep root systems that enable it to penetrate hard soils as well as being able to retain its beauty in the face of environmental factors that would wilt most other flowers. Like the blossoming sunflower, the girl has shown resilience in the face of the bad treatment she receives from Post and Swae.
• "Sunflower" is the second collaboration between the two artists following Swae's guest verse on Malone's Beerbongs & Bentley's track, "Spoil My Night."
• The song features production by Post Malone's frequent collaborator Louis Bell as well as Carter Lang, who is known for his work with Rihanna ("Consideration"), SZA ("Love Galore") and Chance the Rapper ("Wala Cam").
• Several other artists have recorded songs in which they use a sunflower as a metaphor for someone's else's strength and resilience. They include Heart, Basement Jaxx and Lenny Kravitz.
• The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an living annual plant in the family Asteraceae, with a large flower head. It is named because its round flower heads in combination with the ligules look like the sun. Here are some more sunflower fun facts from The Encyclopedia of Trivia:
  
  A sunflower looks like one large flower, but each head is composed of hundreds of tiny flowers called florets, which ripen to become the seeds. One sunflower can contain up to 2,000 seeds.
  
  The flowering head of the sunflower tracks the sun's movement, turning from east to west during the day, a phenomenon known as heliotropism.
  
  Sunflowers are native to America. They were cultivated in North America as far back as 3000 BC, when they were developed for dye, food, medicine and oil.
  
  The sunflower grew popular in Russia when people discovered that its seed oil was not banned during Lent, unlike the other oils the Russian Orthodox Church banned its patrons from consuming. By the 19th century, the country was planting two million acres of sunflowers every year.
  
  Before more modern materials were available, the pith within the sunflower stalk was used in life-jackets to provide buoyancy because of Its extreme lightness.
• The song spent 33 weeks in the Top 10 of the Hot 100, matching Maroon 5's "Girls Like You," and Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You" for the longest Top 10 run in the chart's history.
  
  Post Malone later broke his own record when "Circles" spent 39 weeks in that region on the survey.
  
• "Sunflower" was the first song from a soundtrack to reach the top of the Hot 100 since Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop The Feeling!" from the Trolls soundtrack in May 2016.
• The RIAA announced on February 8, 2024 that "Sunflower" had become the first song in history to go Double Diamond, meaning it's reached an equivalent of 20 million sales in America. According to RIAA methodology, this translates to 3 billion streams.