Songfacts®:

• The phrase "road head" means oral sex in a vehicle. In the song, it takes place on a turnpike exit. According to Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast), it's based on a true story.
  
  "The song is about a road trip I took with an ex and it's about doing anything you can to try to salvage a relationship that's just not working," she explained to NPR. She added that the song deals with "the desperation of loneliness and the desperation of trying to make someone else happy."
• By the time Japanese Breakfast released this song in 2017, the ex she sings about was vanishing in the rear-view mirror. Michelle Zauner married her guitarist Peter Bradley in 2014.
• "Road Head" is part of the second Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Just two years earlier, Michelle Zauner was working in the corporate world, making music as a side hustle. A 2016 gig at South By Southwest around the time her debut album, Psychopomp, was released led to a record deal, allowing her to make music her full-time job. Those first two Japanese Breakfast albums built a solid fanbase but the third, Jubilee, was much bigger thanks to the song "Be Sweet," which earned her lots of TV performances, including on Saturday Night Live. "Road Head" is one of the most popular songs from the pre-Jubilee era, played at most Japanese Breakfast concerts.
• Michelle Zauner took an interest in video and film production when she studied at Bryn Mawr College. She directs most of her own videos, including the one for "Road Head," where she embarks on a road trip with a creature that would scare the kids on Halloween, played in costume by her producer, Craig Hendrix. Zauner gets closure at the end of the clip when she shoots it and sets it on fire.