A song written from inside a house where a marriage is ending, by a man who nearly did not write it because he thought divorce was too ordinary to be worth a song.
Here is who is speaking in each part, what Sam Harris has said about it, and why he insisted on keeping blame out of it.
The Short Answer
A family coming apart, and a child asking it not to. Sam Harris of X Ambassadors wrote it about his own parents’ divorce, which happened when he and his brother Casey were in high school, and he deliberately wrote it from more than one position: the mother’s, the father’s and the child’s.
The Story Behind the Song
Harris has been unusually direct about this. He told chorus.fm in 2015 that it was the hardest song on the album to write because it is so specifically about his parents’ divorce, and that he had not thought it was a big enough deal to write about, because people get divorced all the time.
His reasoning for writing it anyway is the interesting part. The fact that it made him uncomfortable was the argument for doing it, because it makes a lot of other people uncomfortable too, and they do not talk about it when they should.
He and Casey also had to weigh the effect on their parents. He has said the brothers wanted them to hear the song but did not want to hurt them.
Who is speaking?
All three of them, in turn. The opening is a person asking to be held because they are not steady. Then the perspective narrows to a child calling for a mother and a father in the same breath, and saying the house does not feel like a home.
The later lines address the parents individually and with some understanding: an acknowledgement that the mother is tired of being alone, and that the father is trying to stay when what he wants is to go. Both are followed by the same request, which is not to let go.
That structure is why the song works on people whose parents never divorced. A child who can already see both parents’ reasons and is asking anyway is a recognisable position in almost any struggling household.
Is anyone the villain?
No, and Harris has been insistent about it. He has said the brothers have a great relationship with their parents and their stepmother, and that they wanted to emphasise there is a blamelessness in it: relationships fall apart, families fall apart, and nobody is at fault.
That is a rarer position than it sounds. Most songs about a family breaking have somebody to be angry with. This one removes the target and leaves only the loss, which is harder to listen to and considerably more honest.
What about the video?
It adds a layer the lyric does not name. The video follows a couple at two points, an early date and a much later argument at the dinner table while their young son tries to get his father’s attention, with drinking present in the scene.
Nothing in the words specifies that. The song describes instability without diagnosing its cause, which is part of why it has been adopted so widely.
How was it released?
Twice, effectively. It first appeared on the band’s second EP, The Reason, before being issued as the third single from their debut album VHS on 13 October 2015 through KidinaKorner, Geffen and Interscope.
The writing credit lists Sam Harris, his brother Casey, guitarist Noah Feldshuh, drummer Adam Levin and Alexander Grant, who produced it with the band under the name Alex da Kid. The band formed in Ithaca, New York in 2009 and had already broken through with “Renegades.”
It reached the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100 and became the song people bring up first, ahead of the bigger radio hit.
Why is the album called VHS?
Because the record is built from home footage. The band pulled real audio clips from videos their parents took, and from tapes they made themselves as teenagers and in the band’s early days, and threaded them through the album.
That framing tells you how to hear this song. It is not a general statement about divorce. It sits inside a record assembled from one family’s actual tapes.
What happened to it afterwards?
It escaped the album entirely. A remix was used for the film Me Before You, it has been used across television and in a great many hospital, funeral and crisis-related contexts, and it has become a standard piece of shorthand for a scene where somebody is not coping.
Harris has noted the effect this had on the band. He has described the pressure of following VHS, and admitted that at one point he was writing songs purely because they sounded like this one or like “Renegades,” and that the results were unusable.
Why it connects
Because it asks for something rather than describing something. The chorus is a request to be held, repeated, by somebody who has run out of other ideas, and the melody sits low and stays there rather than resolving upward.
Harris has said this became the song people tell him means the most to them, which is the payoff for having written the thing he thought was too small to bother with.
Songs picked up by television and film reach enormous numbers of people who never learn the artist; when a chorus is all you have, our song lyrics search will name it.