Songfacts®:

• In this post-breakup tune, Lissie isn't ready to send well wishes to the ex who broke her heart. Instead, she wants him to listen to the song and feel as sad as she does.
  
  "I think it's self-owning in its anger," she told Americana Highways. "I think there still is an awareness of, even if it's immature, 'You made me feel bad, so I want you to feel bad.' It's an emotional honesty - we feel that way sometimes! I think by the time you get to the end of the song... a lot of this album was me just sticking up for myself and saying, 'I'm allowed to hurt. I'm allowed to be angry. Don't tell me to get over it. I'm allowed these things.'"
• Lissie had time to stew in her emotions at her Iowa farm during COVID-19 lockdown after leaving her ex behind in Virginia. By the time she met with fellow singer-songwriter Madi Diaz over Zoom, the song was ready to come out. After listening to Diaz's History Of A Feeling album, Lissie knew she found a kindred spirit in her heartache that was reflected in "Sad." She explained:
  
  "But you know, listening to her album, she's seen some things and been through some things and battling that sort of resentment and the anger, but also the acceptance and the hope. Again, it's very universal, so she was probably able to tap into some of her own life experience of breakups and people who maybe have hurt you who never had to really answer for it, and how that fits as time goes by. Then, eventually, you just are over it, and you let it go. But when you're in it, there's some fury there, and being denied the right to feel anger is SO BAD. It's the worst. Let me have my anger, let me have my sadness. I will get over it, but only if I'm allowed to feel my feelings and express them."
• This is the third single from Lissie's fifth studio album, Carving Canyons, following "Flowers" and "Night Moves."