Songfacts®:

• "Not Another Love Song" is Ella Mai's first new single since her successful self-titled debut album. The singer dropped the new tune on October 2, 2020, marking its arrival with a debut live performance on Rihanna's Savage x Fenty Show Vol.2, which premiered the same day on Amazon Prime.
• The song finds Mai grappling with falling in love. It's not the first time she's found herself entranced by a guy, so she's cautious, but the feelings are too strong to ignore.
  
  Deep in, swimmin' in my feelings
  I've been here before but it feels like I'm drownin'
  Sinkin', am I overthinkin'?
  Tell me, am I foolish to think you need me here?
  
  Speaking of the song, Mai said it's "about falling in love but not wanting to admit it, so it's quite vulnerable."
• Ella co-penned the tune with songwriter Varren Wade (Mary J. Blige, Kierra Sheard, Fifth Harmony). The pair also wrote together her single "Trip," which has a similar theme of analyzing her loved-up feelings for a man.
• The song's origins lay with a session Mai did with Varren Wade plus the producers Boi-1da and Jahaan Sweet (Eminem's "Lucky You," Drake's "8 out of 10"). After they made a separate track, Boi-1da started playing Mai some of his other stuff. She asked him for a pack and he left her around 15 different beats.
  
  About a month later Mai went through the pack and on hearing the beat for what ended up being "Not Another Love Song," she turned to Wade and told him they had to record it.
• Mai's lyrics for the song speak of her own personal experiences. "It was definitely something that I was going through, but it's also something I've been through many times before," she told Pop Sugar. "Even though at the time, it was specific to that, I could draw from how I felt before in that same situation and how it differed or how it was similar."
• So why did Ella Mai title this "Not Another Love Song" when she's singing about love? She explained to Genius:
  
  "We wrote another love song, as we always do. And I said to [Varren], I'm like, 'Damn, people are really going to be like, 'Oh, Ella Mai, we don't wanna hear another love song, not another love song.' And he looked at me, he was like, 'That would be fire.'"