Songfacts®:

• This dance-infused, club-ready banger finds Tinashe singing of looking for a lover, who is a player. Chris Brown answers her call with a couple of explicit half-rapped verses.
• A player is a guy who sustains supposedly exclusive relationships with multiple girls. The term is likely derived from the phrase "playing the field" and was popularized in the American black community in the 1970s.
• The song was written by Tinashe herself, alongside Chloe Angelides, who was also behind Nicki Minaj's Pinkprint duet with Ariana Grande, "Get on Your Knees."
  
  The spacey production was supplied by Lukas "Lulou" Loules (Carly Rae Jepsen) and Alexander "Alex Purple" Kronlund (Demi Lovato).
• The Emil Nava-directed video is a video game where Tinashe faces off against players in various rounds. She performs the tango, contemporary and hip-hop choreography in a series of dance-offs in order to get to her final round with Chris Brown. "I've seriously been dancing my whole life since I was 4, classically trained in all different styles like ballet, tap, jazz," Tinashe explained. "So it's fun for me to play with different styles of dance."
• Tinashe said during a Joyride listening party that she still has more work to do in order for people to know who she really is. "I'm so excited about 'Player,' she said. "I have an issue with people who put me in boxes that I don't necessarily fit into. They put me in the pretty girl box… like it all came easy to me. [But] we have been grinding a long time to get to where we are."
• When Tinashe was signed to RCA, she didn't have much control over collaborators. She feels the label pushed her into collaborating with Chris Brown, who has a history of reported violence against women dating back to his 2009 assault on Rihanna.
  
  "That was a song that we all wanted it to be this big moment, this big single," she recalled in a 2023 interview on the Zach Sang Show. "So I feel like, in their mind, they were like, 'You need the support.' He was their biggest artist that they had on rhythmic radio at the time. To me, I was like, 'Well, this is a pop song. So, I really don't feel like we should put Chris on it.' That doesn't compute to me, but I don't know."