Songfacts®:

• Camila Cabello pours her heart out about the heartbreak of being let down by her flaky, unreliable friends during this laid-back ballad. Too many of her supposed pals have proved to be fake.
  
  I'm just lookin' for some real friends
  All they ever do is let me down
  Every time I let somebody in
  Then I find out what they're all about
  
  Speaking with Elle about spotting fake friends, Camila said. "I think the only way to know is time. I feel like there are instances and circumstances in your life that always change. You can think someone's your friend, and it could be out of convenience, or there was something in it for them, or whatever."
• The song has a similar theme to Cabello's track "I Have Questions," which was inspired by the heartbreak of a once close friend rejecting her.
• This nearly didn't make it onto Camila as the songstress only finished the track in late November 2017, just meeting the album completion deadline.
• Camila explained the song is "about feeling lonely and disillusioned by people in LA while I was away from home."
• Camila Cabello co-wrote the track with William Walsh, Frank Dukes and Louis Bell with the latter two also producing the song. "'Real Friends' is something that I think she connected to maybe the most out of everything," Bell told MTV News. "Obviously going through the whole Fifth Harmony situation, dealing with the people who you go, 'All right, are these my real friends? Do these people care about me?' It's something that publicly had played out prior, and this song was her way of being able to say, 'I have a song about that concept that I can connect [to] on a super deep level.'"
• Bell explained the reasoning behind the track's minimal production. "That song being so stripped down, it's kind of reflective of saying, 'Real friends, we don't need to dress all this up. This is who I am and I want to be around people who are going to show me who they are.'"