Songfacts®:

• Shawn Mendes enjoyed a year-and-a-half-long romance with Camila Cabello between July 2019 and November 2021. He wrote this pop-rock track a month or two after their split.
• The heartbreak anthem finds Mendes looking back fondly at their relationship as he tries to adjust to being on his own. "You realize you were relying on that person," he told BBC Radio 1's Greg James. "And for me, Camilla was a lot of my support system, and kind of realizing, "okay, I've gotta be there and cope by myself and for myself, and a lot of that just came through in the song."
• Mendes and Cabello carried out their relationship in the public eye, and since their breakup, they've both released music about their romance. Mendes set his song "It'll Be Okay" during the last knockings of their relationship, while Cabello's "Bam Bam" is about her recovery process following their split.
• Mendes co-wrote and co-produced the breakup ballad with his go-to collaborator Scott Harris and Jonah Shy (Fletcher's "Healing," Duncan Laurence's "Wishes Come True").
• The Canadian pop star's longtime collaborator Jay Martin ("Stitches," "Mercy," "It'll Be Okay") directed the video. He filmed it across several days of recording, rehearsing in Toronto and Austin.
• Shawn Mendes gave Cabello a heads-up before releasing "When You're Gone." "Camila and I have always been writers for as long as we've known each other, so we understand what that means," he told Extra. "And we respect what that means. And there'll always be transparency between us."