Songfacts®:

• "Grapevine" is an epic road song set along a stretch of Southern California's Interstate 5. It's a sonic journey where heartfelt yearning takes center stage. So buckle up, get ready to feel the road beneath your wheels, and let Weyes Blood's soul-stirring melodies take you on a ride.
• The track pays homage to a notorious 40-mile stretch of the highway known as the Grapevine, where the journey takes you on a ride from the San Joaquin Valley's farmland, over the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, finally landing you in the dazzling expanse of Los Angeles County. It's the ultimate leg of your road trip home to the city that Weyes Blood's Natalie Mering calls her own.
  
  "Grapevine" isn't just your average road song - it doubles as a breakup anthem. "Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other," Mering said. "We all have a 'Grapevine' entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain."
  
  "Being in love doesn't necessarily mean being together," she continued. "Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection?"
• If a man can't see his shadow
  He can block your sun all day
  He can make you small
  
  Speaking with The New Yorker, Mering said the song was born from her experience with a "narcissistic" musician she was deeply infatuated with during the challenging times of the pandemic. Mering was battling long Covid, although the diagnosis was unknown at the time. Her companion coldly dismissed her struggles, attributing them to mere depression or a lack of outdoor activity and exercise. Mering felt the weight of her mysterious illness and the lack of understanding, "I basically needed to leave him to go be sick on my own with my mysterious illness that nobody understood yet," she said. "And it was heartbreaking."
  
  Mering has now recovered, and her ex has expressed remorse for his previous dismissiveness.
• Interstate 5 lies about 12 miles from the site of James Dean's tragic passing on State Route 466. During the second verse, Mering drives past the very spot where the iconic movie star lost his life.
  
  My car broke down in an old ghost town right around
  Where they got James Dean
  
  Dean was driving his Porsche 550 Spyder when he collided with a Ford Tudor driven by Donald Turnupseed. He was pronounced dead at the scene. "I think he was blasting through an intersection super-fast," Mering told Mojo magazine. "I think he did get got - he got hit by somebody else and died. He was living really fast and reality got him."
• It hits me for the first time
  Now we're just two cars passing by
  
  The last verse is about driving back the other way and wondering whether you're passing your ex on the other side. "It's about a lost love," explained Mering. "And also the idea that the grapevine is entwined in all your old wounds in the past, how you can't enter a relationship without confronting almost every other heartbreak."
• "Grapevine" is the second single from Weyes Blood's fifth studio album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. She recorded it live at Studio Three at EastWest Studios in Los Angeles. "I just want to have that open feel, almost like a road trip," she told Mojo. "'Grapevine' is very much a road song - like a freeway."
• Mering told The Guardian And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is the second album in a trilogy, following Titanic Rising's "observation of doom to come." Hearts Aglow takes a deep dive into the very essence of being immersed in the tumultuousness of life itself. It unravels the complexities and intricacies of navigating through challenging times, exploring the depths of human experience.
  
  The third album in the trilogy is planned to pivot towards a theme of hope, offering a contrasting perspective that uplifts and inspires. "I was trying to process this idea of irrevocable change, and what that does to personal relationships, the damage it can do to people, because it's so isolating," she explained.