Songfacts®:

• This mean-girl send-up started with Maddie Marlow recalling a nasty fellow-pupil. "There was this beauty-queen bully from high school who sent my friends and I home in tears plenty of times," she recalled. "In order to get over it, I had to write a song. So I brought the idea of 'Sierra,' and started singing, 'I wish I had something nice to say…'"
  
  "Tae and our co-writer Aaron Scherz lit up and ran with it."
• The song is actually about a girl named Sierra, who Maddie Marlow was friends with in junior high. "And we get to high school and she kind of turns into the Regina George where she thinks she's the hottest thing and she's the best," she explained to Taste of Country.
  
  One day, during senior year, the bully organized a group of girls in the lunch room to gang up on Maddie telling her she wasn't good enough or pretty enough to be a singer and she was stupid for trying to be the next Taylor Swift." "I went home crying at least once a week because she was just so mean," the songstress said. "I went home bawling that day, picked up my guitar and wrote that first verse."
  
  The next day Maddie met with Tae and Aaron Scherz and they finished the song off. "We write it like so brutally honest, obviously. I mean it has her name in it, for God's sake," she said.