Songfacts®:

• The Accidentals were truckin' through a hectic North American tour when COVID-19 brought things to a screeching halt. Over the course of their subsequent quarantine, which the band spent together in a house in Michigan, they found themselves contemplating the lives they'd left behind. "Wildfire" grew out of those meditations.
  
  Things had been moving fast for the band for the previous two years (2018 and 2019), really, with tons of live shows, workshops, radio-show appearances, and the like. They were in Arkansas doing a series of workshops with producer and songwriter Al Bell when the whispers of COVID first started popping up.
  
  Show cancellations started piling up, and the band was forced to pack things up and head back to their house in Michigan. They were afraid that if they continued on they might get stuck in Portland, Oregon, or somewhere in the middle of the country. At the time, there was no way to know what the pandemic was actually going to look like. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
  
  While quarantined in their Michigan home together, they got to wondering if if they would done things differently pre-COVID if they had they known that they were "on borrowed time," which is where the "Wildfire" chorus comes from.
  
  "For me, it's a good reminder that looking away from the spark, it doesn't stop a fire from growing," Accidentals frontwoman Sav Buist told Songfacts. "Sometimes, you see it coming, and sometimes you don't."
• "Wildfire" was the first single that the Accidentals released for the TIME OUT EP. It was also the song that launched the creation of the EP to begin with.
• The song grew out of the image that it opens with.
  
  Ivy climbs the walls and nestles in the brick
  Sparrow builds a nest above the front door
  
  The house represents stasis. It's not any particular place but is instead a representation of life as it looks after time has stopped-not exactly dead but also not progressing in any clear or dynamic way.
• On Independence Day, driving through the hills
  We were on our way to Bozeman
  
  Bozeman is a city in southwestern Montana. It's the seat of Gallatin County and the home of Montana State University.