Songfacts®:

• Taylor wrote this track for the soundtrack of the movie, The Hunger Games. The film is set in a damaged post-apocalyptic world where teenagers fight to the death in an event aired annually on live television and this song finds her attempting to hang on as others watch her struggle. "Everybody's waiting for you to break down/Everybody's watching to see the fallout/Even when you're sleeping, keep your eyes open," she sings of the trials and tribulations that the youngsters portrayed in the film are forced to undergo.
• Taylor also contributed a second song to the soundtrack, the collaboration with The Civil Wars titled "Safe and Sound."
• Taylor told Rolling Stone that it was an enjoyable change of pace penning tunes for the fictional character, Katniss Everdeen, rather than writing confessional songs about her own past. "Slipping into her mind was such a wonderful break," she said. "It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles. It was almost like a vacation to get to write from someone else's perspective."