Songfacts®:

• Ashley Cooke admits to not always having the best taste in men, and to keep going back to them despite her better judgment. When she tells her friends and family that she's done with a guy, they don't always believe her, assuming she's "crying wolf" because she keeps going back. That's the inspiration for "The Girl Who Cried Wolf," a song she wrote with Emily Weisband, Lauren Hungate and Joe Fox. She told the story of the song on the Off The Record podcast.
  
  "I was just venting," she said. "And I had that title, 'The Girl Who Cried Wolf,' in my phone for a long time, because I was like, This feels like how I feel. And it was the perfect room to bring it into because they just got it. Emily and I bond all the time about the type of guys that we've dated, and Lauren too. We're all just very similar in that way. They're both very happily married to very healthy, wonderful men now, so they're like, 'We love talking about this. It feels like we're back in our 20s and we can talk about this.' So I was their escape too."
• The song appears on Cooke's 2026 self-titled album, but it almost didn't make it.
  
  "A lot of this project I wrote when I was in a relationship," she told Off The Record. "A lot of the songs on the record talked about the beginning phases of the relationship and falling in love and all the good sunshines and roses and yearning and all of this stuff, and that wasn't quite how it ended. So when the record was done, I was like, 'Man, I feel like fans are going to hear this in six months or whenever this comes out, and they're going to think that I'm so in love and so happy and all this stuff, but I'm very much not. And I'm pretty pissed off, to be honest.' And so I was like, 'I feel like I need to write about this.' And I got in a room with some of my favorite co-writers, Lauren Hungate, Emily Weisband, and Joe Fox, and we just wrote it out. Wrote about my patterns and what it's like to go back to a relationship one too many times. It's just not good for me.
  
  And then I called the label, and I was like, 'I've got to put this song on the record.' And they're like, 'Girl, get after it. Do it. If you want to put it on there, put it on there.' And so I did. It's the last song on the record intentionally because it ends at a cliffhanger of like, did she go back? Will she go back? Is she back with him?"
• The title is a variation of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a classic Aesop's fable about a shepherd boy who, to combat his boredom, constantly yells "wolf!" to warm of a threat to the sheep, even though the wolf isn't there. At first the villagers run to his aid, but after a while they stop because they don't believe him. When a real wolf arrives, his true cries for help are ignored and the wolf kills much of the flock.