I Don't Miss You

Album: A Grey Area (2023)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • In this song, co-written by John Mayer, JP Saxe can't stop thinking about his ex-girlfriend. But he doesn't miss her. Not even a little bit.

    "It's a lie," the Canadian singer-songwriter told iHeartRadio in 2023. "It's a song about contextualizing the feelings you'd rather not feel. It's a song about trying to find ways to tell yourself that the emotions you're trying to avoid, you don't have - if you can maybe look at them from the right angle they'll be easier to figure out."
  • Saxe had most of the verses written, but he was stuck on the first line of the chorus. "I don't miss you," he wrote. "I just…" That's where he hit a wall. The line became, "I just fantasize about you being someone who loves me," but it took John Mayer's help to get it right.

    "I worked on it for months and tried so many different things and it never quite felt right. I probably tried 10 different options, maybe more. I got to the point where I thought it was a special song and I wanted to figure out what the right feeling was for that first lyric," Saxe recalled in a 2023 Songfacts interview.

    "I considered who may be able to help, and I texted John the song and I told him the lyrics I was trying to find. He said, 'Why don't you come into the studio, and I'll play some guitars and we can try to figure out the lyric.' And we did just that. We went into his studio, played a bunch of guitars on it, and we found the lyric. And that is how the song became what it is now."
  • This is the lead single from Saxe's sophomore album, A Grey Area, the followup to his 2021 debut, Dangerous Levels Of Introspection, and the EPs Both Can Be True: Part 1 (2018) and Hold It Together (2020). The latter release introduced the hit "If the World Was Ending," a romantic duet with "Issues" singer Julia Michaels, who became his girlfriend shortly after collaborating. The couple broke up in 2022, and Saxe's emotions surrounding the split laid the foundation for A Grey Area.

    "Obviously, there's a lot of different feelings that you go through over a year and a half post breakup," Saxe told the New York Post in 2023, "but this album, in many ways, is expressing how wholeheartedly I believe that love can be so meaningful without lasting forever."
  • For Saxe, songwriting is a cathartic experience that lets him unleash the emotions he usually keeps locked inside.

    "It's the only way to do it," he told Songfacts. "Otherwise, I'm a heavily guarded locked box. Maybe not a locked box. Maybe one of those fancy safes from those old bank robbery movies in the basement. Maybe the ones from Harry Potter. That's what my emotional experience feels like aside from the songs. I would equate my relationship with vulnerability to the funky, magical safes in Harry Potter, and my songs are the spells they use on them."
  • Tying in with the song's theme of self-deception, the music video explores the ways we use work and other methods to hide from ourselves. Saxe, who directed the clip with Nicole Frantz, explained the concept in a behind-the-scenes video, saying, "The idea was [to] create five physical spaces that represent the five ways we think we lie to ourselves with work the most."

    Each room shows how we hide ourselves with work and productivity, drugs and alcohol, sex, sleep, and social media.

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Director Paul Rachman on "Hunger Strike," "Man in the Box," Kiss

Director Paul Rachman on "Hunger Strike," "Man in the Box," KissSong Writing

After cutting his teeth on hardcore punk videos, Paul defined the grunge look with his work on "Hunger Strike" and "Man in the Box."

Queen

QueenFact or Fiction

Scaramouch, a hoople and a superhero soundtrack - see if you can spot the real Queen stories.

Dean Pitchford

Dean PitchfordSongwriter Interviews

Dean wrote the screenplay and lyrics to all the songs in Footloose. His other hits include "Fame" and "All The Man That I Need."

Song Cities

Song CitiesMusic Quiz

Nirvana, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are among those who wrote songs with cities that show up in this quiz.

Jack Blades of Night Ranger and Damn Yankees

Jack Blades of Night Ranger and Damn YankeesSongwriter Interviews

Revisit the awesome glory of Night Ranger and Damn Yankees: cheesily-acted videos, catchy guitar licks, long hair, and lyrics that are just plain relatable.

Michael W. Smith

Michael W. SmithSongwriter Interviews

Smith breaks down some of his worship tracks as well as his mainstream hits, including "I Will Be Here For You" and "A Place In This World."