Songfacts®:

• This love song finds singer/guitarist Fran Keaney meeting someone he likes at an after party after playing at the Darwin Festival in North Australia.
  
  I heard you talking
  Your voice had an old melody
  Like sweet river water
  Back from the bathroom
  
  Nothing happens, but as Keaney walks back home, he imagines reaching the person through time portals and spending eternity with them.
  
  Two figurines on the mountain
  You find yourself again on holiday
  I feel it in my brains, do you feel the same?
  A cameo in your home video
• Fran Keaney explained in a statement that "the lyrics were pieced together over about a year like a little puzzle." He found the first pieces in the tiny town of Rushworth, where "Not Tonight" is set, and the last pieces in Darwin.
• I put myself in a letter
  I send myself on the powerlines
  A picture of yourself in the future
  A nation in the plains, beyond the frame
  
  The line "a nation in the plains" is Keaney's nod to the Australian author Gerald Murnane's 2017 autobiographical novel Border Districts. Keaney explained to Uncut:
  
  "In the book, he traces through the imagery in his mind's eye, whether it's the shade of a tint of some stained glass that he traces through to the color of a bottle of the lemonade, and the family's house that he was at the time, and the piano there that reminds him of the song in the church when he was married... It's very long-winded and esoteric, but I really got into it. I felt like he was awakening a pattern of thought that I've always had, like a pining for something forgotten or not yet found, and that's really inspired a lot of the songs I was writing. Songs like 'The Second of the First' or 'Cameo' took a lot from that."