Songfacts®:

• Thought it was a teenage dream, just a fantasy
  But was it yours or was it mine?
  Seventeen, twenty-nine
  
  Demi Lovato first met Wilmer Valderrama on January 11, 2010 when she was 17 and the actor 29. "I thought, 'I have to have him,' but I was only 17 and he was like, 'Get away from me,'" she recalled in her 2017 documentary Simply Complicated.
  
  Valderrama waited until Lovato was legal before the two became an item. Once Lovato turned 18 that August, they started an on-again, off-again relationship that continued for the next six years. When they finally broke up in 2016, Lovato recorded "Tell Me You Love Me" where she outlined what she wanted to tell Valderrama.
  
  So is Lovato throwing shade at her actor ex on this song for taking advantage of her teenage naivety?
• Lovato wrote and recorded the song for Holy Fvck when she was, yep, 29.
  
  Finally 29
  Funny, just like you were you at the time
  
  Lovato wrote on the Holy Fvck website that "29" is about "wisdom that comes with age."
  
  The singer added that turning 29 put a new perspective on "certain experiences." She now looks back on them with an understanding she didn't have at the time and wanted to write a song about it. "I've had a lot of clarity in several experiences in my life, whether it be romantically, whether it be just like growing pains," Lovato said. "This is one of them."
• Demi Lovato wrote "29" with LA songwriter Sean Douglas, Nashville songwriter Laura Veltz, and Holy Fvck producers Warren "Oak" Felder, Alex Niceforo and Keith Sorrells. Sean Douglas is a longtime Lovato collaborator, working on her hit singles "Heart Attack" and "Sorry Not Sorry." Veltz co-wrote 12 out of the 16 Holy Fvck tracks.
• Demi Lovato debuted the song on TV with a rocking performance on the August 18, 2022 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The performance was part of her three-night takeover on the show when she tried her hand at co-hosting, playing games and assisting Fallon with his monologues.
• When Lovato wrote the song, Valderrama was in a relationship with the model Amanda Pacheco, who is 12 years younger than the actor. In the second verse, she pans her ex's habit of dating far younger girls
  
  I see you're quite the collector
  Yeah, you're 12 years her elder
• "29" went viral on TikTok as many fans used the song to soundtrack their own stories of relationships with older men. "I love TikTok, and watching all of the thousands of women who use '29' as a reality check for their own dating history," Laura Veltz told Billboard. "Then the idea that those women will have daughters, then those daughters will have daughters. I can't even wrap my head around the power of that song, by way of butterfly effect."
• Laura Veltz wanted to write the song for other young women who were victims of older men's fantasies. "Just the idea that you can unplug the power of feeling of 'Oh, he thinks I'm mature for my age.' I used to say that s--t. I used to feel that s--t, and I used to take it as a compliment," she explained to Billboard. "And I feel like we wrote a song that unplugged the power of those words. You are not mature for your age, they're predators, and you need space to be a kid."