Songfacts®:

• The six years between Myles Smith's 7th and 13th birthdays were marked by his father's drawn-out departure from the family. Young Myles had his older brother, sister, and a loyal schoolyard contingent to lean on, but even a decent support system can't quite plug the hole left by a missing parent.
  
  Years later, he tried to untangle the emotional fallout by turning it into a song. "My First Heartbreak" is about the slow-motion heartbreak of paternal abandonment.
• On "My First Heartbreak" Myles Smith recounts the emotional aftermath of his father walking out on his family, focusing on the confusion, pain, and self-blame he experienced as a child and how that impacted him in the long term.
• The song was two years in the making, held up because Smith had to get in the right headspace. "It aligned with my own journey in life of understanding it a little bit more and getting comfortable with it," he told People. "And then reaching that point of feeling finally at peace with the situation felt right to then dive back and talk about it."
• Smith brought the title and the raw story to Andrea Rocha, a Mexican-Canadian songwriter and producer who's worked with artists like Gabrielle Aplin and Ellie Goulding. Rocha instantly saw the hook: what if his father was his "first heartbreak"? That, as it turns out, was all they needed.
  
  "We wrote it in literally half an hour," she recalled to Sound on Sound.
• Lizzy McAlpine collaborator Ehren Ebbage and Smith's regular producer Peter Fenn produced "My First Heartbreak." Ebbage also played bass, guitar, and piano on the track. Daniel Chae (strings and arrangement), James Wells (percussion and engineering), Daniel Said (drums), Michael Freeman (mixing), and Joe LaPorta (mastering) rounded out the production team.
• When Smith started performing "My First Heartbreak" on his world tour, he noticed it resonated deeply with fans, many of whom had their own messy tangles of loss and longing.
  
  "It really did derive from a very personal, very introspective, a very messy place in my head and in my heart," he told People. "That's how it came out on paper, and then to see how it translates live and to see so many other people relate to the story, I think that's what gave it its purpose."
• Smith released "My First Heartbreak" as a single on April 25, 2025, a few days after earning a place on the TIME 100 list.
• The seeds of the song were a conversation between Smith and his brother. "He asked me, 'Bro, have you ever thought what it would be like to be a father one day?'" he recalled to The Independent. "I remember at that moment there was this sort of vacancy, loss, and stillness. It had such a profound impact on both of us: how are we supposed to become someone that we've never seen? Follow a blueprint that's never been laid for us. That was the embers of the song."
  
  Then Smith spiraled. "I was going out more and drinking more, hurting those I loved more," he said. "I was going down a dark hole with it. That conversation opened up all these questions: Was it my fault? Had I put an onus on my brother to play the father role? Was I expecting my mum to have stopped something that she couldn't possibly have stopped? I was having all these teenage revelations quite late in life."