Songfacts®:

• Frontman Tyler Joseph based this song on a conversation he had with his younger brother, Jay, about songwriting. He explained to Jack Saunders of BBC Radio 1 that during coronavirus-enforced isolation he'd been teaching himself to play the electric guitar. Jay had asked to see how the studio process works, and feeling good about his progress learning the new instrument, Tyler gave his younger brother some advice. "[I] just kinda came up with the beginnings of the song," he said. "Almost as a tutorial for him on how to lay out a song, how to start it, how to record it, how to produce it out."
• Using his own writing process as a contrast, Tyler Joseph continued penning the song as some instruction for Jay to not "shy away" and take a leap of faith in order to find himself. "Lyrically, it kinda turned out to talk about being an older brother," he said, "and how the only thing tougher than trying to figure out what your own purpose is, is watching someone whom you love try to figure out their purpose."
• Did you catch Joseph's one-year-old daughter Rosie making a cooing noise in the opening seconds? The Twenty One Pilots frontman explained when he was first working on the song, she was in the room with him. As he sang vocal ideas into his phone, Rosie made a noise in the background, which initially annoyed Joseph as he thought she'd ruined the recording. "But when I transferred it over to my rig in my studio and I was working on that audio file," he said, "I found myself loving that she had been in some way a part of that creative process - and I actually kept her noise in the beginning of that song."
• "Shy Away" finds Twenty One Pilots heading in a more upbeat, poppier direction compared to the duo's darker rap-rock material. Joseph told Saunders he was in a more positive headspace this time around.
  
  "As you move about your life, you start to answer more and more of the questions you had when you were younger," he said. "The truth is, I have found some answers."
• Tyler Joseph created the song at his home studio during the COVID pandemic while communicating virtually with drummer Josh Dun, who was the other side of the country. Dun had to learn how to record his drums on his own, with no engineer around to help.
• This isn't Tyler Joseph's first song written on electric guitar. That would be the quarantine anthem "Level Of Concern."
• Twenty One Pilots released the song as the lead single from Scaled And Icy on April 7, 2021. The album's title is an anagram of "Clancy is Dead," a reference to Tyler Joseph's Clancy alter ego on the duo's previous album, Trench.