Songfacts®:

• Sam Ryder started out in the music industry in the late 2000s as frontman for UK band The Morning After. He then fronted the Canadian outfit Blessed By A Broken Heart and the American rock group Close Your Eyes before going solo in 2014.
  
  Ryder rose to prominence during the first COVID-19 lockdown when he started posting covers of hits on TikTok. They attracted the attention of such megastars as Sia, Justin Bieber and Alicia Keys, and he became the platform's most-followed UK artist in 2020. His social media success led to a recording contract with Parlophone and the management agency TaP Music.
  
  Ryder wrote "Space Man" during the COVID-19 pandemic before he'd signed to Parlophone. It was one of the songs that got the labels interested.
• "Spaceman" finds Sam Ryder imagining he was an astronaut. Though he has "a bird's eye view" of Earth and gets to "rub shoulders with the stars," the singer pines for what he's left behind. Floating on his own in the vacuum of space, Ryder is lonely and homesick. "There's nothing but space, man," he croons. "And I wanna go home."
• Critics have compared "Space Man" to Elton John's music. Certainly its themes of isolation and an astronaut missing his loved ones back home bear comparisons to "Rocket Man."
• Sam Ryder co-wrote "Space Man" with Ed Sheeran collaborator Amy Wadge ("Thinking Out Loud," "Galway Girl") and Max Wolfgang, who has worked with the likes of BTS and Celine Dion.
  
  "It was a gorgeous, boiling hot day in London," Ryder told the BBC, "so naturally, we were in a studio with no windows and Space Man just seemed to come out of space... man."
  
  They wrote it entirely over Zoom. "It was the first song that we ever wrote together," Wadge said, "and in an hour and a half we landed on something, and I was quite excited about it."
• Sam Ryder didn't write "Space Man" with the Eurovision Song Contest in mind, but he caught the eye of the BBC with his profile on TikTok. The BBC did the selection for Eurovision 2022 in collaboration with TaP Music, and on March 10, 2022 they announced Ryder as the chosen entrant with this song.
  
  "It was kind of the song that started my journey, got record labels interested, so I knew it was really important," Ryder told Ken Bruce on his BBC Radio 2 show. "I guess like bit of expression and bit of music and I sat on it for quite a long time thinking when's the best time to release this song and anyone that knows me knows that I overthink absolutely everything and I'm glad, though, that I over-thought this because having waited on it, we've been given this amazing opportunity with Eurovision to release it and give it it's little moment in the world. I think it's perfect for it."
• "Space Man" came in second place in the Eurovision Song Contest final with 466 points. It earned the UK its best result since Imaani was runner-up in 1998 with "Where Are You."
• "Space Man" debuted on the UK singles chart at #2, becoming the highest Eurovision chart entry since Gina G's 1996 chart-topping hit "Ooh Aah... Just A Little Bit."