Songfacts®:

• Hanson, the brothers who exploded on the scene with the effervescent "MMMbop" in 1997, didn't fill their entire debut album with fluffy pop songs. "Yearbook" tells the story of kid named Johnny who goes missing. Nobody at school knows what happened to him, and in the yearbook he appears without a photo. It captures that feeling of frustration kids get when adults won't tell them what's really going on, fearing they can't handle in. In the vacuum, rumors spread, as they do here with the mystery of Johnny.
• According to Ellen Shipley, who wrote this song with the middle brother, Taylor Hanson, it's based on a true story. "I asked Taylor, since he seemed the one with the talent and the ideas, 'What story in your life bothers you?' And he told me this story of this kid that disappeared, and the whole thing is real," Shipley said in a Songfacts interview. "They don't know whether he committed suicide, they don't know what happened, but he disappeared. And so it was a dark song, but I love it."
• Hanson wrote or co-wrote every song on their debut album, Middle Of Nowhere, often with experienced songwriters brought in by their label, Mercury, who signed the band after hearing "MMMbop," which they wrote on their own, on an album they released independently in 1996. Ellen Shipley had written the #1 Belinda Carlisle hit "Heaven Is A Place On Earth." Mercury had her listen to "MMMbop" before working with the brothers. She warned that label that she wasn't going to write that kind of song, but they had her write with them anyway. They were all very young: oldest brother Isaac was 16, Taylor was 13, and Zac, the drummer, was 11.
  
  "They came to my studio in Studio City," Shipley told Songfacts. "They were really cute, except for Zac who kept making paper airplanes and throwing them all over the place. And they brought their parents, who were interfering with the writing."
  
  "I finally threw them all out," she continued. "I told them to go to a restaurant so I could work with Taylor. I said, 'Take your kids out to eat or something, I can't do this.'"
  
  Even though Isaac and Zac didn't work on the song, they were still credited as writers, as they were on every track from the album.
• Around this time, Ellen Shipley also worked with another boy band on their debut album. Along with Rick Nowels and Allan Rich, she co-wrote "I Drive Myself Crazy" for 'N Sync.