Vocalist and The Voice UK coach Danny O'Donoghue found himself in the papers when he split with Lithuanian model Irma Mali after four years together and was subsequently linked to Voice runner-up Bo Bruce. This song, is about his painful break-up, which he told The Sun was a huge learning process for him in how to deal with the public and media. He explained: "This is the band's first time of dealing with the spotlight. I've been asked why I let the rumours go on for so long. But there's no handbooks on how to deal with this, plus I was grieving. My relationship had ended."

The song title refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth. The phrase was coined by an American academic, Stanley Milgram, after his "small world experiment" in 1967 in which he sent several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the packet only to others they knew by name. The aim was to get it, eventually, to a set final individual, a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts. The average number of times it was passed on, he said, was six. Hence, the six degrees of separation.