Songfacts®:

• Despite being just 20 years old, alternative R&B singer Zada has learned to hide her vulnerability by building walls to shield herself from potential pain in her relationships. In this single from her debut album, the walls are coming down - if she can trust her partner to embrace what's behind them. She sings:
  
  Tearing down these walls
  I can stand or fall
  Tonight I'll show you everything
  Will you accept my offering?
• Zada was born in Ethiopia but spent most of her formative years in Whistler, British Columbia, where she learned to express herself through communing with nature in outdoor sports and writing songs.
  
  "'Walls' was a perfect example of that blend," she told the Songfacts Podcast. "I was on an island, and we set up a DIY studio with my two producers and my best friend and my mom, so we all went there. We'd surf every morning at 6 a.m. and then start the session at 11 a.m. and work through until around 10 p.m. We got 'Atlantic Times' and 'Walls' out at the same session."
• Zada credits her producers, Chin Injeti and Brian West, for helping her tap into the vulnerability she needed to express through her vocals. "We had one day where Brian and Chin were like, 'You just gotta really let go on this song and not worry so much about the pitch or the key or anything like that and just see what happens,'" she recalled. "I was like, 'Oh, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I want to keep it good, but steady and straight.' And then Chin picked up the mic and he's like, 'See, watch this,' and he did a bunch of screaming over the track. And I was like, 'Whoa. That's insane!' We didn't end up keeping it, but he's like, 'Yeah, you can do whatever you want with your voice to express to the fullest.'"
• The lyrics started out as a poem Zada wrote years earlier until her team helped her flesh it out in the studio. The singer told Songfacts how she evolved from a poet to a singer-songwriter: "Before I did any singing or piano playing, I did more poetry and creative writing. That was my vehicle to express myself best. I felt like it left less boundaries to get stuck in, so doing poetry allowed for an easy flow - you don't have to worry about rhymes, you're just putting everything down on the paper - and it allowed for me to be a bit more vulnerable. That's what I normally do, but sometimes it's different. Sometimes it's a piano track that happens that I make and send off to the producers, and then we collaborate from there. Or just vocals - I'll send over a vocal sample and say, 'Hey, mess around with this,' or something."