Songfacts®:

• This is one of two bonus tracks made available on the physical deluxe edition of the Evermore album. Republic released the pair of songs to streaming services on January 7, 2021.
• The song has a heartbreaking theme of being unable to move on from a past love interest.
  
  Did you hear about the girl who lives in delusion?
  Breakups happen every day, you don't have to lose it
  She's still twenty-three inside her fantasy
  And you're sitting in front of me
  
  Swift has remained stuck in the same place since a breakup when she was 23.
  
  I'm sure that you got a wife out there
  Kids and Christmas, but I'm unaware
  'Cause I'm right where I cause no harm
  
  The songstress believes her love interest has likely moved and now is happily married with children.
  
  And it's been so long
  But if you ever think you got it wrong
  
  Though it's been a long time since their breakup, Swift still dreams of being reunited with her ex.
• Taylor Swift was dating Harry Styles on her 23rd birthday, but split about a month later and didn't have any other known boyfriends for the next couple of years. However, the singer moved on from that relationship and started a long term romance with Joe Alwyn. Swift has said that much of the Evermore album is rooted in first-person fictional lyrics, so it's clear this song comes from her imagination.
• Swift wrote the lyrics to producer Aaron Dessner's dreamy acoustic instrumentation. The National band member originally penned the music for his Big Red Machine project with Justin Veron, but Swift heard it and came up with "Right Where You Left Me" and "Happiness" literally days before the completion of Evermore. "That is a little bit how she works," Dessner told Rolling Stone. "She writes a lot of songs, and then at the very end she sometimes writes one or two more, and they often are important ones."
• According to Dessner, there were two songs added to Evermore at the last minute: "Right Where You Left Me" and "Happiness." Mixing an entire album is a Herculean task, and when Dessner told the engineer Jon Low there were two more songs to mix before the deadline, he was not impressed. The producer recalled Low looked at him as if to say, "We're not gonna make it."