During this sultry Frank Dukes-produced dance track, Camila Cabello sings about a relationship that's addictive:
Just like nicotine, heroin, morphine
Suddenly, I'm a fiend and you're all I need
All I need
Yeah, you're all I need
Love is Cabello's drug and she just can't quit her beau.
Camila first performed "Never Be The Same" in the summer of 2017 while she was the opening act during Bruno Mars 24K Magic World Tour. When she sung the tune on July 23, 2017 at a show in Portland, Oregon, Camila told the crowd that the song is about "finding someone you really love and being forever changed by that person."
During her visit at 92.3 AMP Radio in New York City, Camila explained to morning hosts Shoboy and Nina, the guy she's singing about is not a current significant other, rather someone whom she remembered after looking at her notes and sketches for songs.
"It was just that title, 'I'll Never Be The Same,' the songstress recalled. "And there was a beat that somebody played, and I was like, 'this sounds like being in love.' So I wrote it about that situation, but that happened like two years ago. I need something new now!"
Camilla told
OfficialCharts.com in a 2017 interview that she considers this to be the best song she's written to date. She explained:
"I love love songs and I feel like that song captures what it feels like to be in love. That, and it was the easiest song to write. I did it in like an hour. Compare that to
Havana, which took months."
Camila Cabello told The Sun: "I feel like it describes the loving and that was actually about a boy that was not good for me. But I actually got a good song out of it!"
-
The London Sunday Times asked Camila Cabello if she was trying to shock with her refrain of "just like nicotine, heroin, morphine... you're all I need."
"No," she replied. "To me it was harmless, because I've never done drugs, so it was saying, 'Love is my drug.' But when I showed it to my mum and dad, they said, 'You can't sing this.' I have a sister who's 10. They said, 'Imagine Sofia singing this.' I hadn't thought about that, so there was this whole crisis."
Cabello ended up with a clean version of the track on the Camila album too, because she has young fans and her little sister sings her songs with her friends.
Filmed in London and directed by Grant Singer, the song's music clip flits between glossy set pieces and grainy home-movie style clips of Camila. "The video is supposed to visually represent all the different ways love makes you feel," the singer tweeted. "So all the scenes are different sides to that feeling."
Country star Kane Brown joins Camila Cabello on a remixed version. "When we were writing this song, Frank Dukes kept telling me 'the melodies you're doing make it feel like this could be a country song,'" Cabello said. "Ever since we finished writing it, I always thought this could be re-imagined with a country artist, and I heard Kane Brown's song '
What Ifs' one day and freaked out!!!! I was like he's the PERFECT artist to do this with."
Camila Cabello said during a fan Q&A that she is especially proud of this song, as she feels it "sounds like what my soul sounds like."
Camila Cabello wrote the song with Sasha Sloan (Louis Tomlinson's "
Just Hold On") and Noonie Bao (Zedd & Alessia Cara's "
Stay"). Sloan explained to
Flaunt that the song took on a different meaning for each of the writers.
"For Camila, at that time in her life she didn't have a boyfriend, and she was just creating. I was in love with someone at the time, and when we wrote that I was thinking about them. The other co-writer, Noonie Bao, probably had someone else in mind. I think songs are cool in that way, because they mean different things for different people."