Songfacts®:

• LP (Laura Pergolizzi) tends to bleed out in her songs, and in "Lost On You," she gets a lot off her chest (which is tattooed with a huge ship at sea). She wrote the song when she slowly started to realize her girlfriend wasn't going to be her lifelong partner. "I felt like my lover was drifting away – slowly leaving the building – and there was nothing that I could do," she said in a Songfacts interview. "It's a breakup song, but it happened almost a year before we broke up, and it was kind of like, 'Hey, do you see what's happening? Is it lost on you that this is going to die?' And then it did."
• Born in Long Island, New York, LP released independent albums in 2001 and 2004, but they didn't find an audience. She wrote hundreds of songs, and started to find takers a few years later, earning co-writes on hits for the likes of Rihanna ("Cheers (Drink To That)" and Rita Ora ("Shine Ya Light"). Warner Records signed her in 2011, but by the time her album was completed in 2014, there had been a lot of turnover at the label, and many of her supporters were gone. Released with little fanfare, the album tanked. LP signed to Vagrant Records and used the experience to emotionally power "Lost On You," released in 2015. The full album, also titled Lost On You, appeared a year later.
• According to LP, this song gets misinterpreted a lot, but she's OK with it. "People would make it that it was romantic, like, I'm lost on you," she told Songfacts. "Like it's about being lost being in love with you, and that's not really what 'Lost On You' is about. That's the beauty of songs."
• LP wrote this song with Erick Landero, Nate Campany, and Mike Del Rio. Campany and Del Rio, who together produced the track, continued working with LP, writing and producing tracks on her next two albums.
• Released on November 20, 2015, "Lost On You" didn't do much damage in LP's homeland, but it was an instant success in Greece, topping the chart there. It went on to reach #1 in 17 other countries, including Italy, France, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. The song showed incredible staying power, racking up obscene streaming counts (400 million+ on Spotify) as new listeners discovered the song. The song is particularly popular on YouTube, where the official video has over 400 million views and a live performance video from 2016 has nearly double that total, bringing the total views to well over a billion.
• LP lets loose a few quick whistles in this song. She's always been a whistler, but didn't start doing it on songs until her 2011 track "Into The Wild." While listening to a playback of that song in the studio, she inadvertently started whistling along. When her producer heard it, he had her record it, integrating her whistling into a song for the first time.
• LP plays some ukulele on "Lost On You." She started writing songs on the instrument after mastering guitar and found it could put her in a different mindset. Many think of the ukulele as a novelty instrument, but LP takes it seriously and will use it on songs like this one with lots of emotional heft.