Songfacts®:

• Daya's second single from her self-titled debut EP is the followup to her Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hit "Hide Away." Recorded and mixed at Blackwood Studios in Los Angeles, Daya worked on the track with:
  
  Songwriter Gino Barletta, whose other credits include JoJo's Hot 100 single "Disaster."
  
  Mike Campbell, one of the songwriters behind A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera's hit tune "Say Something."
  
  Singer-songwriter Britten Newbill whose song "Good Morning" was covered by John Legend for the opening track on his Evolver album.
  
  Gino Barletta and Britten Newbill also co-wrote "Hide Away."
• Daya sings here about how she doesn't need a man to capture her dreams. She explained to Entertainment Weekly: "It's about being a girl that goes after her own dreams and really fights for what she wants, and not letting anyone get in the way of that. It's important for young girls to know that they don't have to act a certain way or depend on someone for happiness. They can find all of that within themselves."
• The song also has an empowering message calling for gender equality. "You know, it's kind of a reflection on society as a whole and just my thoughts, my take on it," Daya explained to ABC Radio. "And I think that it has gotten a lot better - gender equality has, over the years, but I think there's still a little bit of a disconnect between some people like, 'Oh, some girls can't do this' or 'Some guys can't do this.'"
  
  She added, "I think that girls and guys should be able to do whatever they want and go after what they want to do in life."
• Mike Campbell was inspired to write the song after watching Pink accept the President's Award at the 2015 BMI Pop Awards. "I walked into a writing session the next day and was inspired by Pink and her sass and her swag as this really empowering female artist and I said, 'Why don't we write something kind of like Pink?'" he recalled in a Genius annotation. "I just had Pink's essence in mind."
• Another inspiration was Aqua's 1997 hit "Barbie Girl." Campbell and his co-writers Gino Barletta and Britten Newbill, decided to Aqua's dance-pop tune on its head by creating a response to it.
  
  I'm never gonna be that girl
  Who's living in a Barbie world
  Could wake up in make up and play dumb
  Pretending that I need a boy
  Who's gonna treat me like a toy
  
  Campbell said: "It's establishing the expectations that young girls and women put on themselves sometimes and maybe saying that you don't need to do those things and establishing that out of the gate before you get to this chorus, which says what you're going to do instead."
• Daya named her debut album after this song. She told ABC Radio that it was the perfect title for the LP, "because it has such a strong message and because it's so important to me."
  
  "It was just a clear... like, I didn't really have to think about it," Daya added. "It was just kind of like, 'OK, this should be the album title, this is what it's gonna be called.' And I don't regret my decision at all. I love it!"