Songfacts®:

• This Soul-Pop ballad is the debut single by English singer and 2010 X Factor runner-up Rebecca Ferguson. She penned the song with Eg White, the man behind such hits as Will Young's "Leave Right Now" and Adele's "Chasing Pavements." The song was released November 27, 2011, a week before Ferguson's debut album Heaven was made available.
• A few months after coming second in X Factor, Ferguson started dating Zayn Malik from fellow finalists, One Direction. However, the couple broke up a few months later. Speaking to the Daily Star Sunday, Ferguson admitted that their split, as well as some of her other past relationships, influenced the lyrics that she wrote for Heaven. She confessed: "I wrote a lot of tracks about what was happening to me at the time I was making the album, and that includes things with Zayn. A lot of the songs are about past relationships. The theme is relationships in general, making them, breaking them, love and loss. Recording was hard. It wasn't a case of skipping to the studio and being happy.
  I got really emotional and sometimes I had really bad days. I poured out all my heart and soul into the album and would often cry."
• Ferguson told the Daily Star Sunday that she is proud that she contributed so much to the writing of Heaven. "At the beginning," she said, "they didn't know I could write so they were bringing songs in for me but I put my foot down and said if you want me to be a credible artist you have to let me write. Now I've co-written every single song on the album."
• The emotional ballad finds Ferguson looking for hope in love amidst the obstacles of every day existence. "Maybe the man in charge doesn't like my face," she sings, "but then this world's not always good, and nothing's real but love". "It's real life," Ferguson told The Daily Telegraph. "We're all trying to find something, everyone's looking for the missing piece, and we pursue the wrong things thinking that's where it's gonna be."
• Ferguson had been desperate to be a singer since primary school but until her successful run on X-Factor, her music career consisted of a succession of failed auditions and broken dreams. This song finds her singing about the fickle side of fame and how love is the only thing that matters. She explained to The Sun. "When I was obsessed with making it, I thought about what made me happy. It wasn't a big house, a car or money. It was my family and my kids. If you haven't got nothing, you've got nothing."