Songfacts®:

• This wistful alt-rock ballad finds Heavy Hours frontman Michael Marcagi longing to be with the girl he loves. In his mind, he's already there. "And I'm stuck inside, but I'm on your back porch," he sings.
  
  The band thought it was just a pretty song to balance out the heavier tracks on the album and was surprised when everyone who heard it declared it would be a single. Marcagi told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022, "'Back Porch' is funny because we tried to write songs that would have these huge, really loud choruses or super memorable licks, and it didn't really have any of those. It's just a pretty simple two-chord song that doesn't really even have a true chorus. So in our minds, it was just a pretty song that we really liked and meant a lot to us, but by no means was going to be this single. But then we got home and showed the album to our friends and family, and for some reason, I would say 90% of the people we showed this album to were like, 'Yeah, 'Back Porch' is the best song... that's the single.' That kind of caught us by surprise.
  
  It's not a very produced song at all. It's like an acoustic guitar and a bass and a lead guitar. It's a very simple drum beat. But it kind of became a bigger thing than we expected."
• Heavy Hours guitarist AJ Yorio was playing around with melody and lyric ideas in the studio when Marcagi suggested they add the four-part harmony.
• The band recorded Gardens on a farm in Richmond, Virginia, with producer Adrian Olsen back in 2018, before they had a record deal or even a manager. They planned on releasing the album the following year, but they ended up landing a record contract and working on their Wildfire EP instead, which was released in 2021. For their first full-length album, they decided to go back to their roots with an updated version of Gardens.
• According to Jon Moon, the band's bass player, Olsen amplified the crescendo moment by adding chimes, which ended up being Moon's favorite part of the song. Marcagi added, "We never had access to instruments like that, so we kind of went buck wild. Then on the drive home, we were like, 'Oh, shit, we gotta learn how to play this live.'"