Songfacts®:

• This song finds Taylor regretting the way she broke up with an ex-lover. A part of her wishes he would run back to her and, maybe, they will get back together. It sends a completely different message to the commitment-phobic beau in "All You Had to Do Was Stay."
• Taylor told Rolling Stone the song is about an ex who bought a house two blocks from hers (whom she implies was Harry Styles). Her liner notes message for this song state: "He Drove Past Her Street Each Night."
• Taylor starts the song with her ex driving past her house.
  
  It's 2 am, in your car
  Windows down, past my street the memories start
  
  The implication is that Taylor's former boyfriend has been up all night thinking.
  
  The singer frequently uses 2 a.m. in her songs, having also given the time a shout out in "Breathe," "The Way I Loved You," "Mary's Song (Oh My My My)," and "Enchanted."
• The song is one of three 1989 tracks written and produced by Taylor with fun.'s Jack Antonoff (the others are "Out Of The Woods" and "You R In Love.")
• This originally sampled a snare from Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy," which came about from Swift and Antonoff bonding over the '80s pop group. "The moment when we shifted from friendship into working together was when we were talking about the snare drum on Fine Young Cannibals' 'She Drives Me Crazy,'" Antonoff told Rolling Stone. "Taylor brought it up first, and I was like, 'Holy s--t, you're not going to believe this: I just sampled that snare in a track.' I played her one second of it on my iPhone, and she was like, 'Send me that track.' That became a song called 'I Wish You Would.'"
• There are three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of 1989 that are actually voice memos recorded to Taylor's phone that were later turned into songs (This song, "I Know Places" and "Blank Space"). We hear her explain: "This is a song I did with Jack Antonoff, and Jack is one of my friends and so were hanging out and he pulled out his phone and goes 'I made this amazing track the other day. It's so cool, I love these guitar sounds.' And he played it for me and immediately I could hear this finished song in my head, and I just said 'Please, please let me have that. Let me play with is, send it to me.'"
  
  "And so he sent it to me and I was on tour and this was me playing the track on my laptop recording me singing the vocal into my phone and it ended up being a song called 'I Wish You Would,' because Jack wrote back and said 'I love that.' So this is another way of writing, it's writing to track."