Songfacts®:

• In this melancholy folk song, Noah Kahan tells the story of two friends who attempt to mend their relationship after being torn apart by tragedy. After surviving a car accident where other people died, one of them stays in their small hometown and tries to move on, while the other is haunted by survivor's guilt until he finds religion and sobriety. The first friend tries to reconnect by offering his home as a safe space for reconciliation, where drunken partygoers won't test his sobriety and orange juice is available as an alternative to alcohol.
  
  "It touches on what it's like to go through something really traumatic with somebody and to have something that should bring you closer, but instead it pulls you farther away," Kahan told Billboard in 2022. "That's really hard, to be bound by this pain and not even have it be something that brings you closer."
• Being back in his hometown of Strafford, Vermont, during the COVID-19 pandemic forced Kahan to confront a lot of painful memories from his past, which formed the basis of the songs on 2022's Stick Season, his third studio album. The singer-songwriter explored his own battle with alcoholism on "Dial Drunk," and while the characters in "Orange Juice" were created from an amalgamation of stories from his friends and relatives, the song still has strong ties to his own experience.
  
  "I drew on a lot of inspiration of my own life," he said. "My own struggle with addiction and alcohol and friendships that I've lost and haven't been able to maintain and I wanted to create a story about two people that represented a lot of the challenges that I've gone through and that people in my life have gone through."
• In the pre-chorus, Kahan sings from the perspective of the friend who stayed behind. He regrets being so wrapped up in trying to move on with his life after the incident that he neglected to consider his friend's feelings and why he felt the need to escape. He sings:
  
  Feels like I've been ready for you to come home
  For so long
  That I didn't think to ask you where you'd gone
  Why'd you go?
  
  In the chorus, the other friend explains that he had to leave because the entire world changed in the wake of the tragedy and he could only view their hometown as a painful reminder. He couldn't understand why Kahan's character didn't bear the same scars. "Don't you find it strange that you just went ahead and carried on?" he asks.
  
  Kahan points out that he's also made changes and gotten sober: "The last time I drank, I was face down, passed out there in your lawn."
• Kahan's old friend may have stronger feelings of guilt because he was the driver during the fatal crash. In the song's bridge, Kahan wonders if he and the rest of their friends are like crows, symbolizing grim reminders of death that will only pull his troubled friend's soul back into darkness if he were to return home. But Kahan also reminds him, perhaps for the first time since he was so preoccupied with moving on, that the accident wasn't his fault. "You didn't put those bones in the ground," he sings.
• The pandemic lockdown also gave Kahan the opportunity to reassess his career, which began with his breakthrough indie-pop single "Hurt Somebody" in 2018. He'd been feeling the pressure to churn out another commercial hit while wrestling with his desire to lean into a folk-centric sound. Once he was back in Vermont, he spent a week writing the folk EP Cape Elizabeth to test the waters. When it was warmly received by his fans upon its 2020 release, it gave him the courage to attempt a full-fledged folk project, which became Stick Season. Two years ahead of its release, Kahan began posting snippets of songs on TikTok, generating a huge buzz on the platform and sending fans clamoring for the album when it finally dropped in 2022. It peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200, marking Kahan's first appearance on the chart.