Songfacts®:

• Thelma & Louise is a 1991 motion picture directed by Ridley Scott where best friends Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) and Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) go on a road trip to escape their dreary lives. Bastille songwriter and frontman Dan Smith is a big movie buff, and he based this song around the film and its escapist theme.
• Skipping town, down to Mexico
  Lipstick on, in the Thunderbird
  
  Bastille starts off the song by referencing Louise's 1966 Ford Thunderbird convertible. A replica of the car provides the backdrop for the music video.
• The rest of the song is a meditation on "days like these," where you want to get away from your boring modern life. Smith said he set out to write a love letter to Thelma & Louise, feminism and escapism. "Throwing off the shackles of a life that you may be frustrated by," he said. "I think a lot of people feel a lot of the time, particularly during the pandemic the idea of just wanting to be in your mind somewhere totally different."
• Smith penned the tune with Swedish songwriter Rami Yacoub (Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time," Ariana Grande's "One Last Time") and longtime collaborator Mark Crew.
• This is one of several songs Smith and Rami wrote for Bastille's fourth album via Zoom during lockdown. Speaking to Yungblud on his BBC Radio 1 show, Smith said he'd struggled to pen material remotely, but after staring at each other for a while, he and Rami had a breakthrough. One evening, they wrote three songs that are on the album in a couple of hours, and also the beginnings of "Thelma + Louise." Smith added: "We're both really quick and so it's just really easy. He had a guitar. I was on the keyboard."
• Dan Smith often incorporates his love of film into his songwriting. Some examples:
  
  The track "Glory" is based on the Wayne's World scene where Wayne and Garth are on the hood of the car watching planes fly over.
  
  "Blame" features violent imagery inspired by The Godfather.
  
  "Good Grief includes a couple of dialogue samples from 1980s teen movie Weird Silence.