Songfacts®:

• Built around a driving backbeat, "Take Me Back" is a love letter to Danielle, Este, and Alana Haim's gloriously chaotic days of teenagehood.
• The verses feel like a series of old Polaroids: missed calls, teenage crushes and days wasted away.
  
  The chorus is simple and direct:
  
  Take me back, I feel it
  Take me back, like a memory
  Take me back, just thinking about it
  Take me back, brings us back to me
  The Haim sisters tong to relive those carefree days
  
  The rollicking blues-inspired song is rooted in the three Haim siblings' shared experiences, particularly their high school years attending Los Angeles County High School For The Arts. The lyrics recount stories from that era, some sweet, some messy, all tinged with the bittersweet feeling of a simpler, irretrievable past.
• The sisters wrote the song during a period when, for the first time since high school, all three found themselves single. This led to them spending more time together, reminiscing about their teenage years and the adventures they had.
  
  "We started writing this at my home studio on GarageBand. It immediately felt good cause it was nice and fast," Danielle Haim wrote on social media. "We just had this refrain... 'Take me back, Take me back'."
  
  The sisters brought the idea to their producer, Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Clairo) and co-writer Tobias Jesso Jr. (Harry Styles "Boyfriends," Dua Lipa's "Houdini") joined them. As they exchanged crazy stories about their teenage years, the rest of the song flew out.
  
  "Long story short – high school is insane," said Danielle Haim.
• The Haim sisters play the big three: electric guitar, bass, and drums. Rostam handles pretty much everything else: glockenspiel, Moog synthesizer, keyboards, Hammond organ, piano, acoustic guitar, 12-string guitar, electric guitar, mandolin and harmonica. The one exception is the saxophone, played by Henry Solomon, a USC jazz alum.
• The song is filled with Easter eggs from the sisters' teenage years, but they've changed the names to protect the guilty. If you were in high school with a Haim, and you suspect a lyric might be about you, it probably is.
• Haim shared the backstory of "Take Me Back" with Apple Music, revealing that the song began unexpectedly during a casual studio visit.
  
  Danielle Haim explained: "Our friend Tobias Jesso Jr. was in town while we were working in the studio. Honestly, we weren't planning on writing anything that day, we just wanted to play him some of the stuff we'd been working on. He's from Vancouver, and somehow the conversation drifted to high school - what we were like back then, what we were doing."
  
  Este Haim chimed in: "To be fair, all three of us went to the same high school, so we don't exactly have any outside perspective on what it was like anywhere else."
  
  The nostalgic thread sparked the idea that eventually became "Take Me Back."
• When Haim joined Nick Grimshaw on the BBC Sounds podcast Sidetracked with Annie and Nick, talk turned to the title of their album I Quit.
  
  "There's this film called That Thing You Do," the sisters explained, referencing the 1996 cult classic about a fictional '60s one-hit-wonder band. At the end of the movie, the band's frontman, Jimmy, is in the studio trying (and failing) to record a follow-up single. Frustrated, he steps up to the mic and says, flatly: "I quit. I quit."
  
  That throwaway moment became a lifelong inside joke. "Peppy and snappy," Haim added. "So growing up, whenever we were checking mics, we'd always go, 'I quit.'"