The Night We Met

Album: Strange Trails (2015)
Charted: 75 84
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Songfacts®:

  • "The Night We Met" is a haunting song about a romance that slowly slipped away. Lord Huron frontman Ben Schneider wants to rewind to the night they first crossed paths in order to rewrite the past and sidestep the present pain. He longs for a time when their connection was untarnished, uncharted, and innocent, free from the shadows that haunt the present.
  • The song is the closing track of Lord Huron's second album, Strange Trails. The preceding track, "Louisa," is an ode to finding love, but "The Night We Met" maintains the album's darker and desperate undertone, painting a vivid portrait of love's intricacies and the lingering heartache it can leave behind.
  • The song went viral after it showed up in series 1, episode 5 of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. It plays in a scene where the main character, Clay, slow dances with Hannah. At first, Ben Schneider was hesitant about letting the track be used, but his wife gave him a gentle push: "Just do it, put it in the show."

    At the time, the couple were living in France. "We were gone for a few months, and when we came back my manager was like, 'Something's happening with this song,'" Schneider told the BBC.

    He didn't expect much, maybe a brief bump in listens, then a return to obscurity. But the opposite happened. "Rather than falling off into nothing," he said, "it fell off and then slowly ramped back up. And it just seems to keep going."
  • "The Night We Met" became a hit in several countries after featuring in 13 Reasons Why, including Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United States. Its success garnered Lord Huron a deal with Republic Records.
  • Lord Huron recorded a remix version with the same lyrics but additional vocals by singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. The remix was included on the soundtrack for the second season of Thirteen Reasons Why.
  • "The Night We Met" also showed up in 2015 in the superhero series The Flash, and in 2018 in the Showtime drama series The Affair.
  • The song was written as "a wistful reflection of a relationship, maybe with a sense of regret of where it's ended up and where it started." Schneider thought it made a perfect closer for the album, though he didn't anticipate its longevity. "My wife always said there was something special to it," he recalled.

    She was right. Years later, it remains one of Lord Huron's most recognizable tracks, with a second life on TikTok where it's been repurposed into everything from breakup edits to nostalgia-drenched memes. It turns out "The Night We Met" has a haunting sort of elasticity, stretching to fit whatever feeling you've been quietly avoiding.

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