Songfacts®:

• LP is the singer songwriter Laura Pergolizzi, who describes herself as "a bloodletter of emotion." In this song, she feels like she and her girlfriend are trapped in muddy waters, and it might be time to give up the fight. Like most of her songs, it's very personal.
  
  "It's a confusion song," she said in the Build interview series. "It's like fighting my way out of the confusion. It just felt ominous - everyone's been in a breakup and it feels very heavy and very ominous. I was comparing our relationship to destroying the planet, how you just keep doing it. You know it's a finite situation where you can only destroy it for so long before it's spent and over, and that's what I felt like we were doing."
• LP wrote this song with Josh Record, a British songwriter who co-wrote the Ella Henderson song "Yours." The clanking sound throughout the song came from a strange instrument they found in the studio. "We had this weird chains thing in the studio," LP told Build. "It was the jankiest studio of all time. We wound up going home and writing it in his bedroom because it looked like a bomb shelter. It was like caveman songwriting. But we went back to his house and it came very fast."
• "Muddy Waters" plays in the last scene of the Orange Is the New Black episode "Toast Can't Never Be Bread Again," the season 4 finale (air date: June 17, 2016). It also appears in the 2019 episode of The Good Doctor, "Believe."
• LP made her mark as a songwriter before signing with Warner Records in 2011; her co-writes include ("Cheers (Drink To That)" by Rihanna and "Fingerprint" by Leona Lewis. Her debut album on the label didn't appear until 2014; by then there was a different vibe and less enthusiasm for her work, as some folks who championed her at Warners were no longer there. It underperformed, and frustrated, she parted with the label.
  
  LP channeled her energy into the songs for her next album, including "Muddy Waters," released in 2015 as her first single on Vagrant Records. The song got some attention, but her next single, "Lost on You," was gargantuan, going to #1 in several countries and earning over a billion views on YouTube.