Songfacts®:

• In the first single from Twenty One Pilots' fourth studio album, the duo's lead vocalist, Tyler Joseph, struggles against opinions that he's "evil to the core" and "emotional," but he finds comfort in the fact that there are others out there just like him:
  
  The world around us is burning but we're so cold
  It's the few, the proud, and the emotional
• When asked if the song represents his fear of losing contact with where he's from, Tyler told Paper: "I guess there's always that fear that you're going to change as a person. But also, whether or not you're in the spotlight making music, you're going to change too. I mean, Josh and I are right now sitting in Columbus, Ohio, at my house and we love it here. It's our hometown and it always will be. So I think in the song 'Fairly Local,' it's more metaphor. We had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who like listening to music or using music to get through tough times. If anything, I think Josh and I learned when we were traveling the world during the last album cycle that everyone's the same, everyone feels the same issues. So it's kind of a way of getting on the same level as these people and telling them, in a sense, we understand what you're going through."
• As for the lyric "Yo, this song will never be on the radio," Tyler explains to Radio.com: "When we wrote the last record we didn’t know what kinds of formula in a song to get on the radio. It's funny. When you start saying words fast without any note value attached to it, it's then called rap and if you rap you can’t be played on any alternative radio stations. There’s all these rules that we weren't aware of. We are in no way mad about that. We understand that there’s a certain type of song that is aerodynamic enough to be on the radio. A lot of people would say that that’s a good song. I guess we thought, man, do we have to write a record that has a bunch of songs that fall into what would be considered a radio song? That was something that I was kind of working through. Now I understand all these rules cause we've been around it one time. Do I have to obey them completely or can I just continue writing the way that I've always written? So, no, we're not rebellious about it. We don’t think that the radio sucks or whatever. It was just something that we had to get off our chest."
• The music video, directed by Mark C. Eshleman, finds Tyler singing in the halls of a crumbling old house, while bandmate Josh Dun pounds the drums in a snow-filled room with flakes drifting through the ceiling.
• This peaked at #8 on the Rock chart and #4 on the Rock Digital Songs chart.