Songfacts®:

• Sometimes it's hard to let go of our old dreams, even when we have new ones. When Maia Sharp made some big changes in her life, ending her marriage and moving from her native California to Nashville, she still clung to some youthful fantasies that no longer suited her. "Old Dreams," she told Songfacts in 2023, is "a reminder to let my dreams grow with me."
  
  Sharp, who wrote the track with LA-based singer-songwriter Garrison Starr, continued: "What I really want from my personal and professional life is going to change over the years so if I don't get something now that I wanted when I was 25, I have to check myself to see if I even still want it. Usually, thankfully, I don't. My co-writer and longtime friend Garrison Starr and I were just catching up one night, not thinking we were going to write, when we hit on this idea. She was the one who said, 'Dude, you know we have to write this right now.' I'm pretty sure I swore and rolled my eyes and then we went and wrote it because she was right."
• Sharp's previous album, Mercy Rising, was written in the thick of her breakup and big move, with a pandemic thrown in for good measure. Reckless Thoughts finds her looking back on those events with a new perspective.
  
  "I want to write songs about where I am in my life, which hasn't always been the case in my life. It kicked in hard for Mercy Rising and I wanted to keep that going here," Sharp told American Highways. "So that next stage is looking back from a different perspective… you can't ever think that you'll get even a fraction of the answers you want if you only look from one place, from one point in time. Especially if you saw things from the eye of the storm, like on the last album. This album is looking back on that, post-shift."