Songfacts®:

• This song was inspired by Benee's fascination with snails while under coronavirus-imposed quarantine in her native New Zealand. She wrote and recorded the feel-good pop number with her regular producer Josh Fountain shortly after her country opened up from lockdown.
• Benee initially wrote the upbeat song about her being a snail, but then she and Fountain decided they needed to make it relatable, so instead she just compares herself to a snail.
• Garden snails are nocturnal animals and move to food and partners in the late evening or at night. They hibernate during the winter and live on their stored fat.
  
  I'm like a snail, you're a guy
  Kinda mad I can't fly
  When it's day, hide away
  But come out when it rains
  
  Benee explained that there wasn't much she could do during her weeks in COVID-19 isolation, "So I would spend a lot of time outside looking at snails and would think about how they're doing their own little thing and they're all free. I just played around with the idea of being kind of like a snail and how I come out in the rain. Being stuck inside because of COVID, it's kind of my lockdown song."
• Unlike the slow-moving titular gastropod, the song arrived on August 10, 2020 at breakneck speed. Benee released "Snail" less than four weeks after her previous single, "Night Garden."
• Other songs that reference snails in the lyrics include:
  
  The Pixies' "Silver Snail." This was inspired by the snail's reproductive technique, which involves stabbing each other with a tiny spike called a love dart.
  
  Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)." Art Garfunkel declares he would "rather be a sparrow than a snail," which ties in with Benee's lyric that she's "kinda mad I can't fly."
  
  Donovan's "There is a Mountain." Donovan sings, "The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is." Apparently this is not a drug reference; it comes from a Buddhist saying concerning change.
• The motion graphics studio Goodbye Robot created the animated lyric video. Their other projects include creating concert visuals for Missy Elliot and the music videos for B.O.B's "Air Bender" and "Fingerprints."
• Directed by the Australian artist Anita Fontaine, the video starts off with Benee waking up to feed her pet snails before heading to work in her secret elf lab. After downing a potion, the singer leaves home on her bicycle and encounters a storm. After being struck by lightning, Bennee turns into an elf with long pigtails and cycles through a luminescent mushroom wonderland under the glow of a sparkling sky.
  
  "I knew I wanted the vid to be a weird fantasy story involving snails!" Benee said of the clip in a press statement. "I said to Anita that I wanted to be an elf with long braids riding a bike and have giant mushrooms somewhere in the vid... She came back with the treatment, and I loved ittttttt! Her imagination is supa whacky in the best way, and I'm so happy with how 'Snail' turned out!"