Songfacts®:

• In this unusual post-break-up tune, Maia Sharp realizes what she thought was true love was a pale comparison to the real thing. The country-rock singer-songwriter illustrates her point by likening her former relationship to a restaurant with a limited menu and a movie without sound. She was happy in her ignorance until she discovered the truth about what life has to offer.
  
  "You were my whole flat world," she sings. "Til the day I discovered it was round."
• The offbeat concept is typical of Sharp's lyricism. "I try really hard to find a new thing to say or at least a new way to say an old thing. It doesn't always work out but that's what I'm shooting for. I also love when a punch line is double edged," she told Songfacts in 2012. "You were my whole world...until I knew what the world could really be… Songs and stories with some layers and twists are just more compelling to me so I try to write like that."
• The key title phrase was inspired by Sharp's friend, who had just made a life-altering decision. "I wanted to say, 'You are my whole 'something' world," she told Baltimore Outloud in 2009.
  
  "'Whole Flat World' made me think of a friend of mine who had been married to a man for years and was just leaving that man to be with a woman for the first time in her life. She was overwhelmingly happy. It was like this whole new world opened up to her, 'Oh, this is how it feels.'"
  
  Sharp knew the feeling: She came out as a lesbian when she was 23 years old.
• The EP's title, Eve And The Red Delicious, is borrowed from one of the song's verses:
  
  Blame it on Columbus or Eve and the red delicious
  I'm not the first in history to want a little more than what was dealt to me
  
  Sharp uses two examples of famous figures who made big discoveries that changed their perception of the world. A popular historical myth claims that Christopher Columbus set sail to disprove the theory that the Earth was flat, and the biblical account of the fall of man in Genesis is attributed to Eve eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil against God's command. Although the type of fruit is never mentioned in the Genesis story, artists have often depicted the scene with Eve biting an apple. Anyway, it makes for a more intriguing title than "Blame It On Columbus."
• This also appears on Sharp's 2009 full-length album, Echo. Around this time, she performed as an opener for Bonnie Raitt (who sings on the track "Death By Perfection") and embarked on a national concert tour to promote the release.