Songfacts®:

• Written while spending the day lying in a Stockholm hotel bed, Onward and Sideways explores the process of falling desperately in love. Radin told Radio.com he originallly had no intention of letting anyone else hear the music. "My motivation was to woo her in the old romantic sense of the word," the singer explained. "I would lay in bed all day with the BBC on mute and I would just write, thinking, 'Will this song make her fall in love with me?' I wasn't even thinking of recording the songs for anybody but her."
• This song finds Radin describing the uncertainty of how to tell his sweetheart the way he feels about her. "I'm so bad at telling people how I feel, and that's why I picked up songwriting at such a late age. It really saved my life in a communication sort of way," he told Radio.com. "With regards to interpersonal communication, I'm just terrible at telling people how I feel and expressing my emotions. And that's why I still do it."