Songfacts®:

• Marian Hill got a lot of Shazams when their song "Down" was used in an Apple AirPods commercial in 2017. "Sideways" is a track from their second album, Unusual, which was released the following year.
  
  Vocalist Samantha Gongol plays a sassy vixen on many of their songs, but here she's much more vulnerable as she tries to make sense of this guy she digs who's always looking at her sideways. Her bandmate, Jeremy Lloyd, created the track, keeping it percolating to just under a boil as Gongol's vocals are the focus.
• There are some lines in this song that ring true for Gongol:
  
  I'm not the kind of girl that likes to hold hands
  I tend to run from it as fast as I can
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Marian Hill, the duo had this exchange:
  
  Samantha: "Jeremy and I had this really long conversation where I said something like, 'I think holding hands is really intimate and it makes me uncomfortable.'"
  
  Jeremy: "I think you were saying it was more intimate than sex."
  
  Samantha: "I think I did say that, yeah. It's definitely one of our more sad, reflective pieces, but it wasn't autobiographical other than that line."