Songfacts®:

• In 2016 Judah and the Lion frontman Judah Akers experienced both elation and tragedy. While his band's song "Take It All Back" was climbing to #1 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, his parents' marriage was falling apart. The singer poured his feelings out into the Pep Talks album.
  
  "It's just sort of [Akers'] way of processing through the good and the bad and the ugly of all that," banjo player Nate Zuercher told ABC Radio. "For him, writing songs has always been his way of processing his emotions."
• Though the lyrics in this song are pained, the music is upbeat. Zuercher explained the dichotomy reflects Akers' mantra.
  
  "It's a pretty sad song, but Judah always talks about how he grew up, and a way of him for being able to deal with his pain was to go up in his room and dance around," Zuercher said. "We all love having dance parties and things like that, and so we wanted to create a song that encouraged people to release their struggles and pain through dancing."
• The song's animated visual tells a heartwarming love story of two high school kids. "For 'Why Did You Run?' I wanted to offset the heaviness of the lyrics with a whimsical and hopeful music video," explained the video's director, Matthew DeLisi, to Forbes. "We chose the format of stop motion to tell this particular story."