Songfacts®:

• Carrie Underwood penned this mandolin-tinged song with Zach Crowell and Ashley Gorley. She said during an interview with People that it represents one of two "bona fide" love songs on Storyteller. "It's something I have not really done before," Underwood added. "I think the reason I shy away from love songs is that I find so many to just be super cliché: 'Oh, your eyes, when I look at you…' It's just not real."
  
  "The things I love about the two that I have, 'Heartbeat' and 'Like I'll Never Love You Again,' is that they're very conversational and real," she continued. "It's imperfect. It's not putting love or this person up on a pedestal, like you can do no wrong. It's not fairy tale-ish. It's real.'"
• Co-writer and producer Zach Crowell is best known for helming Sam Hunt's hit Montevallo album. Crowell recruited Hunt to supply vocal back-up harmonies for this song.
• Carrie Underwood sings here about a couple looking to spend time together away from the party crowd. The lyrics were inspired by the singer's own situation with her husband, Nashville Predators hockey player Mike Fisher. "We are always dressing up and going places, but never for ourselves," she told Billboard magazine. "We have this charity event or fundraiser. Obviously those words don't sing well in a song - 'I love it when we're at a fundraiser' - but for us, that's our life."
  
  "You can substitute a kid's soccer game," Underwood added. "You can substitute whatever it is in your life that is keeping you from being alone together. I feel like people get it."
• Underwood and Hunt performed this song as a duet at the Grammy Awards ceremony in 2016.
• Carrie Underwood recalled the story of the song to The Boot:
  
  "Zach Crowell and Ashley Gorley came in to write with me that day. They had some stuff going, some ideas, and Zach's so good at putting together music and grooves and things like that … Of course there's always about 20 different ideas that everybody's working on at all times, right? So it's like, 'Well, if you like it, we can go with it, and if not, we can find something else,' and I said, 'This is really cool. Let's live here for a bit and see what happens.'
  
  It's so simple. The word 'heartbeat' isn't in a ton of songs, but it just seemed to be so honest and refreshing, the way we started writing it, things that we would want our lives to be, a simple kind of love. Everybody gets so busy and caught up in everything. You're always - at least I'm always - trying to hang out with a million different people all the time. Sometimes you just want to be like, 'Can it just be me and you for a second?' and I feel like that's kind of where it was coming from, and everyone can relate to that."
• Much of what you hear on the record is from Underwood, Gorley and Crowell's original demo. Crowell said: "Pretty much, demos are demos of the thing, and you put some real drums on it and mix it a little more, and you get a super-great vocal. [In this case,] there's a little more detail, but they're pretty similar."