Songfacts®:

• Here, Tate McRae sings about continuously splitting from, then returning to, a toxic lover. She uses the metaphor of a revolving door to describe the pattern.
• McRae drew from her own experiences with relationships that seemed impossible to escape. The idea of the revolving door, she explained, came up during a writing session with Ryan Tedder and Amy Allen, when she suddenly realized how much of her life felt stuck in an endless loop - not just in love, but in nearly everything. The song, initially intended as a simple love story, took on a deeper meaning when McRae later wrote the bridge alone.
• The song is at least partly inspired by McRae's relationship with Canadian NHL player Cole Sillinger, whom she dated from 2021 to early 2023. She recalls meeting him in Boston after a concert:
  
  I still think 'bout that night out in Boston
  I'm more hurt than I would admit
  
  Rumors swirled that Sillinger wasn't exactly the poster boy for fidelity.
  
  McRae previously visited the same experience on the title track of her Think Later album:
  
  Met you in a night out in Boston
  Put your hand on my thigh in the Commons
• McRae recorded "Revolving Door" for her third studio album, So Close to What. The album details the Canadian pop singer's experiences and growth in her late teens and early 20s. While most of the record leans into confident, sassy pop songs, "Revolving Door" is one of the few tracks where she lets herself be openly vulnerable. McRae considers "Revolving Door" the saddest track on the project, telling Elvis Duran she wrote it when she was feeling "the most down" during the album-making process.
• Ryan Tedder and Gran Boutin handled production, with Boutin also taking on programming and engineering duties. The production builds gradually, starting with a more stripped-back verse and growing in intensity towards the chorus. The song ends in a frenzied manner, with McRae breathlessly begging, "I need a minute."
• The world's first revolving door was the Van Kannel Revolving Storm Door, patented on August 7, 1888, by Theophilus van Kannel of Philadelphia. Van Kannel wanted to eliminate the issues caused by traditional doors, such as drafts, noise, and difficulty opening in strong winds.
  
  And while McRae's "Revolving Door" is the latest to spin this metaphor, it's hardly the first. A few other songs have taken a turn through the revolving door of, well, revolving doors:
  
  2001 "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" by Radiohead
  
  An experimental, electronic track from Amnesiac where revolving doors become a symbol for choice, transition, and Thom Yorke's general sense of unease.
  
  2002 "Revolving Door" by Crazy Town
  
  This nu-metal track from their album Darkhorse uses the revolving door as a metaphor for a cyclical, troubled relationship.
  
  2010 "Revolving Doors" by Gorillaz
  
  From their album The Fall, this melancholic tune uses the image to reflect on transience, constant movement, and, presumably, the existential crisis of animated musicians.
• Carrie Bradshaw's on-again, off-again relationship with Mr. Big in Sex and The City depicted a "revolving door" relationship, characterized by cyclical patterns of attraction and separation. Although McRae didn't initially write this song about Sex and the City, after watching the show, she saw Carrie Bradshaw use the phrase and took it as a sign she was on the right track with the song's theme.
• The "Revolving Door" music video uses a white room with 15 doors (representing album tracks) to symbolize being trapped in a repetitive cycle. McRae and dancers perform choreography that visually expresses the song's emotional themes, culminating in her crying, emphasizing the exhaustion of this cycle.
• For the video, McRae had to learn and sing certain lyrics backwards because of reverse effects used in post production. She also had to train herself to whip her hair in a way that would look natural when played in reverse.