Songfacts®:

• "Nervous" finds Shawn Mendes getting butterflies from being around a love interest.
  
  I get a little bit nervous around you
  Get a little bit stressed out when I think about you
  Get a little excited, baby, when I think about you
  
  Despite his stacked resume of hit singles, Shawn isn't immune to feeling more than a little bit nervous when he with a crush. He admitted to Entertainment Weekly that in such scenarios, he acts just like any normal 19-year-old:
  
  "Dude, I get nervous in front of every girl. Honestly. And that sounds so dumb and cheesy coming from me." he said: "One thing I love is that the song sounds like a super sexy Prince song, it sounds super confident - but it actually isn't. It's about getting nervous, and I think that's a cool [juxtaposition]. I'm really proud of that one."
• Another song with a similar theme of getting nervous when around a crush is Michael Jackson's 2001 single "Butterflies." That tune was inspired by the feeling in the stomach that songwriter Marsha Ambrosius got when she was around a guy she was completely smitten with.
• Shawn penned the bouncy tune with Julia Michaels the songwriter behind Justin Bieber's "Sorry" and Selena Gomez's "Good For You". Michaels, who also duets with the Canadian on another of the album's tracks, "Like To Be You", told Billboard about collaborating with him.
  
  "We went on tour together, and we had talked about writing together and we just were like if it happens, it happens. No pressure. And we ended up getting in the room together. We wrote, I think, three songs in two days and two of them are now on the record and they're both just really intimate. One's really fun and we just have a really good chemistry in the studio, so it worked out great.
  
  "I think he just wants people to know who he is and how much he's grown. We had very similar conversations, talked about relationships and where he's at and just very personal things and it's important to him and I think that's amazing. And it's important to his fans, too."
• Shawn Mendes admitted in his 2020 Netflix documentary Wonder that his back catalog of songs are all about Camila Cabello. Though the pair only started dating in July 2019, there had been chemistry between them since they first worked together on the 2015 single "I Know What You Did Last Summer." We now know the girl Mendes gets butterflies from being around is Cabello.