I Like Me Better
by Lauv

Album: I Met You When I Was 18 (The Playlist) (2017)
Charted: 58 27
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Songfacts®:

  • This was the first charting song recorded by Ari Staprans Leff who performs under the stage name of Lauv. Leff's performing moniker is Latvian for "lion" and he adopted it as a nod to his mother's heritage and the fact that Ari means "lion"' in Hebrew. In addition, his own zodiac sign is Leo.
  • This song was inspired by a relationship that Leff started two months after he had first moved from San Francisco to the music technology program at New York University's Steinhardt school. He told iHeartRadio:

    "It just that feeling of [when] I was a freshman in college and didn't really know who I was or who I wanted to be. But I knew that with this person, I just liked myself better."
  • Written and produced in his bedroom, this was the fastest song that Leff had ever penned to date. He added with a laugh to Billboard that it was also "the first really happy song I've written for myself in God knows how long."
  • This was Leff's first international success under his Lauv stage name reaching the Top 10 in the German, Austrian and Australian singles charts. However he has also achieved some success writing and producing songs for other artists, most notably, "No Promises" for Cheat Codes and Demi Lovato.

    Lauv believes it took off as people see the track as an antidote to some anti-love pop songs populating radio. "I see a lot of people who want to pretend, 'I'll never fall in love, I'm f---ing cool,'" he told Billboard. "But, we all want to fall in love."
  • The song finds Lauv reflecting on the first time that he'd fallen truly in love. He now hopes to find that experience again. "It's kind of just like that feeling of everything else is crazy in my life and I don't really know what the f--k I'm doing, but whatever we have going on is dope," Lauv told Genius. "I find now, I wake up every day and I'm on my phone, or I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'm on my phone. It's sad. The first thing I do is do that. It's so nice when you're with somebody and you can just lay there and watch them wake up, or whatever it is."
  • Lauv told ABC Radio how his former girlfriend always made him feel like he was a better person.

    "I can be, honestly, very self-critical," he explained. "And she brought out the stuff in me that was good - stuff that I didn't even realize about myself."

    "It's like when you're around somebody and they're like, 'You look awesome when you do this' or 'You have this really amazing quality,'" Lauv added. "And you're like, "Really? I didn't even realize that.'"
  • The song started off as a throwaway memo that Lauv sang into his iPhone. "I came in that day and... I had no concept, no lyrics, no idea I was going to write that song," he told MTV News. "I had just gotten some new synth sounds, and then I threw in this drum loop, and then I got the whole melody."

    "I thought I was going to replace it with a different sound later but I ended up just sending that to my computer and chopping up that voice memo with all the noise and everything and just using that," Lauv continued. "It was probably the fastest song I've written. It kind of feels like it wrote itself, honestly."

    Lauv ended up transforming his voice memo into a noise that sounds like some sort of synthesized cello.

Comments: 1

  • Jerome from Cebu "It's kind of just like that feeling of everything else is crazy in my life and I don't really know what the f--k I'm doing"
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