Songfacts®:

• Bootstraps (Jordan Beckett) wrote this song after spending a night with an old friend. "'Whenever You're Around' is about as straightforward a song I could write," he said in a Songfacts interview. "It's that universal feeling of being around someone and the world feels a little better when they're around."
  
  Many close friendships are separated by time and distance, but when those gaps are closed, it's easy to reconnect.
• This song sounds like it could be directed toward a romantic partner because the friendship sentiment is similar. "I didn't want it to have to be a love story song," Bootstraps said. "I feel like a lot of songs are written like a man and a woman, so I tried to rein that in a little bit on that song, and I thought of a lot of things like my relationship with my niece and nephew. It's like, whenever you're around, everything's a little bit brighter in my world."
• An inspiration on this song was "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers, which Withers wrote about his friend, Skip Scarborough. The joyful tune could relate to any close relationship, but was specifically inspired by a friendship.
• This is part of the Demo Love album, Bootstraps' first since his 2016 covers album, Homage. The title is a play on the double meaning of the word "demo," which is an industry term for an initial rough recording of a song, but can also mean "demolish."
• The music video was directed by Bootstraps' friend Sam Jaeger, who has scores of credits as an actor on movies and TV series. Jaeger stars in the video along with Alexandra Daddario and Erika Christensen. The video begins and ends at a birthday party for a young girl. When she smiles at a boy wearing a baseball uniform, it sets him alight with young love - he goes inside to flex in front of a mirror. This was inspired by one of Bootstraps' childhood memories when he shared a similar moment after a Little League game.
  
  "Sam was really the first person to motivate me to go into music," Bootstraps told Songfacts. "I was really reluctant at the beginning, but then I did the music for his first film, Take Me Home. I knew I wanted him to do a video, and that song was specific because Sam and I had talked about that before, especially with his wife, where they'd been through a lot of things, and Sam just kept coming back to the fact that just whenever she's in the room, life feels better. So I knew he would get it, and I knew he would be able to flesh that out as a video."
  
  The video was the first for Bootstraps, whose music is often used in TV and film.