Songfacts®:

• This self-doubting folk-rocker was written by First Aid Kit's Klara and Johanna Söderberg during a weekend trip to California's Joshua Tree. The Swedish sisters explained to Consequence of Sound:
  
  "We rented a gorgeous dome house that was very isolated. When we wrote this song we'd been playing around with these old occult themed board games, tarot cards and an ouija board that was in the house. There was a storm outside, it was late at night. We could see the starry sky very clearly. We were overcome by this haunting feeling of being only the two of us alone in a house in the middle of the desert. This was during a quite tumultuous time of heartbreak and emotional disorientation. This song came to us in the midst of all of that."
• The American musician Gram Parsons loved Joshua Tree and spent a lot of time in the desolate location. "Joshua Tree is pretty special for us being huge Gram nerds," Klara Söderberg told The Sun. "We've read all the biographies so for us it was Mecca."
  
  Johanna added that she was struck by how desolate it was with its weird trees, "though coming from Sweden, it was also so exotic. It seemed like the farthest away from Stockholm you could get."
• Directed by frequent First Aid Kit collaborator Mats Udd, the song's eerie video depicts the Söderberg sisters as the ring leaders of an entranced group of women. First Aid Kit said:
  
  "We wanted to create a dreamy and mysterious world. It's an homage to old 70s horror films and the aesthetics of that era. 'Rebel Heart' was written in the desert after a night of experimenting with an Oujia Board and other occult themed board games. We thought the video should reflect that.
  
  It's a song about identity and femininity. It's about the destroyer we all have inside of us, that dark force that wants to take over. We wanted to only feature women in the video – the red moon represents a sense of sisterhood."