Tell Me Why

Album: F--k Love (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • While most of The Kid Laroi's debut mixtape, F--k Love, details the Australian rapper's newfound disdain for romance after a messy breakup, its second single, "Tell Me Why," is about the painful loss of a different kind of relationship. Laroi lets his emotions flow on the heartwrenching track, recorded in the aftermath of his friend and mentor Juice Wrld's fatal overdose in December 2019. He tries to mask his pain with alcohol and other substances but knows he needs to find a better way to deal with his grief before he suffers the same fate as his friend:

    Cause if I keep thinking 'bout our memories
    Then it's gon' be in memory of me
  • This was the first song Laroi recorded after Juice's death. After spending a few weeks in Juice's hometown of Chicago following his passing, Laroi returned to Los Angeles, ready to make music. Working with producers Taz Taylor and Rio Leyva at Internet Money Records on the track, Laroi freestyled the lyrics and the song came together within 30 minutes.

    "I listened to it and I was just like, 'Damn, this is good.' Yeah, I was really in love with it. It was like for two or three months that I had it and I was just sitting with it. I never got sick of it," he said in a 2020 Genius interview. "I loved the song. I actually fell in love with my own song, which I never really do."
  • Juice Wrld, who appears on F--k Love's previous single, "Go!," was instrumental in putting The Kid Laroi on the map. After opening for the rapper on his 2018 and 2019 Australian tours, Laroi - who signed with Juice's label, Lil Bibby's Grade A Productions - moved to Los Angeles and bunked with Juice and his entourage for his first three months in the city. In the meantime, the 16-year-old soaked up all the knowledge he could about the recording process by watching his mentor in the studio.

    "He would be in the studio obviously every day recording f--king a million songs, and I would go in there and just watch him and watch how he was doing shit," Laroi told Beats 1 radio host Zane Lowe.

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