We Never Met

Album: Hard Settle, Ain't Troubled (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Similar to Charlie Kaufman's characters in the comedy-drama movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the lyrics in this song find Donovan Woods trying to erase a relationship from his memory. In our interview with Woods, he explained: "I don't discount that as a strategy in life: just pretending something that you didn't like didn't happen [laughs]. It's a pretty good strategy sometimes to say, 'I'm going to totally forget about this and just move forward. I'm just going to pretend like it didn't even f--king happen' because some things are just awful."

    He continued, "It's probably not super healthy, but to me it would have been an interesting way to approach something like it. Working backwards from that idea, you get the rest of those verses. You get the, 'Let's say this. Let's say this. Let's say this.' You can still live a lie like that. You have to undo a lot of stuff, but that's what I was trying to do in that song."
  • Woods says that it wasn't a particular experience that inspired this song. "There are certainly events in my life that I would like to completely and totally forget about like everybody, but it's not a specific thing," he told us. "It's just that mood. The mood of feeling like, Well, how am I going to get over this? I was trying to communicate that mood for sure."

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