Songfacts®:

• The Heavy Hours wrote this song with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. It's a very agreeable breakup song, with lead singer Mike Marcagi imploring his girl to give him another chance in rather poetic terms:
  
  If you're the needle
  I'll be the thread
  And put us back together again
  
  He seems to like his chances, and the uplifting melody agrees with him.
• The lyric doesn't reflect any personal breakup from the band or from Dan Auerbach. The song was written very efficiently, which was a big change for the band. It was the first time they worked with an outside writer.
  
  "When we write music, it always starts out, no matter what, like a weird phone idea," Mike Marcagi said on the Songfacts Podcast. "Then we bake that in our basement songwriting oven for a month. But Dan was like, 'Hey, let's write a song in an hour before lunch.'"
  
  "It was song, melody, lyrics, start to finish," guitarist AJ Yorio added. "All the aspects of a song you would need to go into a studio and record it, done in an hour. It was just a completely different approach. We'd put all of our melodic ideas together and just power through. Whatever doesn't work, we throw away immediately. There were no egos in the room. You never felt offended if you suggested something and Dan was like, 'No, that's not going to work.' We just moved through the songs and some stuff stayed and whatever didn't we'd just leave on the road."
  
  Said Marcagi: "I'm sure that Dan thought critically about his songwriting technique, but it was almost as if, 'Yeah, let's write a song in two hours because later tonight I got places to be and I got records to record.'"
• Simone Felice of The Felice Brothers produced this track. He taught the band a valuable lesson by playing anthemic songs like "Mr. Brightside" and "Wonderwall" in his car and explaining how these kind of songs make you feel something through their melodies. "There are simple songs that you can play on an acoustic guitar but you can go play them for 40,000 people in an arena and everyone will sing them back," Marcagi said.
• "Don't Walk Away" was the first Heavy Hours single. It was released in July 2020, months after the pandemic lockdown, which made marketing a challenge. The band got creative, embarking on an RV tour where they would drive to radio stations and venues, set up their gear and play for employees. These mini-concerts lasted about seven songs each and had audiences sometimes in the single digits, but it worked to raise awareness and also hone their skills. When restrictions were lifted and live concerts resumed, they released their Wildfire EP and did more traditional touring.
• The song peaked at #21 on Billboard's Adult Alternative Airplay chart, a significant achievement for a debut single. It indicated that the song gained traction with radio stations and listeners, potentially laying the groundwork for further success.