Songfacts®:

• "Up All Night" is a collaborative song featuring The Lumineers and Noah Kahan, released as the lead single from James Bay's fourth album, Changes All The Time. The song is a restless meditation on the overthinking that haunts us when the lights go out. Bay, Kahan, and Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers forge ahead through their own personal anxieties, determined to squeeze every drop out of life despite the mental static that often keeps them awake.
  
  In Bay's words, the song is about "navigating the great weight of all the stuff that plays on our minds."
• The song begins with a steady, percussive groove - no drums, mind you, just old fashioned stomps and claps - before it swells into a feel-good chorus that insists we all need to talk more openly about the things that keep us tossing and turning at night. It caps off with a soaring guitar solo, leaving no emotional stone unturned.
• Bay wrote the bluesy song with Mark Broughton, who engineered Changes All The Time, and his producer Gabe Simon (Noah Kahan, Koe Wetzel, Maren Morris).
  
  The whole thing came together in a rather spontaneous late-night jam session. The track started when Mark Broughton began noodling around on the piano after finishing a different take. Bay grabbed his guitar, mirrored Broughton's notes, threw in a few extra chords, and voilà! Two hours later, they had the foundation of "Up All Night" recorded.
  
  From there, Bay thought, it sounded like too much of a party to keep to himself so he reached out to Kahan and The Lumineers, who both jumped on board.
• Back in 2019, Kahan opened for Bay on his The Electric Light Tour. "We have a few different connections!" Bay told NME. "We're both signed to the same label and, back when my first album was going well, the guy who signed me introduced me to Noah's music. He was brilliant from day one; it just took the world a little longer to understand that."
  
  When Kahan opened for him, they were playing to crowds of about 3,000. A few years later, Bay found himself opening for Kahan in front of 20,000 people a night. "It's been lovely to see him get recognized like that," he said.
• When Bay floated the idea to Gabe Simon of working on a song together with The Lumineers and Kahan, the producer forged the collaboration. Simon used to play in the Kopecky band, which The Lumineers once opened for, and he crafted much of Kahan's Stick Season album.
• "Up All Night" resonated with listeners, climbing to #1 on Billboard's Adult Alternative Chart. It was the first time Bay snagged the top spot, surpassing his previous best with "Hold Back The River," which peaked at #2. It's fair to say, insomnia never sounded so good.
• Gabe Simon's songwriting wheels started turning after a conversation with Bay's wife, Lucy. He recalled in a 2026 interview with the Off The Record podcast: "His wife had said something like, 'Oh, he's probably going to be up all night thinking about that.' And I was just like, 'Oh, that's a cool idea for a song.' You've always got to be listening, just paying attention. And then we went into the studio, and I was just like, 'What if you wrote a song about ruminating, not being able to process something, or just the OCD, the obsession of it?"