“a modern love story, but I wish I was joking..”
Some songs arrive like lightning. Others take their time, circling around you until you finally give in and let them speak. Bad at Being Friends was one of those songs.
I didn’t sit down to write it as a single. I wrote it because I was exhausted from a cycle I couldn’t escape. The kind of relationship where you can’t be together, but you can’t seem to let go. Every time I thought I’d closed the chapter, the story would reopen with a text, a call, or a moment that pulled us back in.
Where the Song Began
The first lines came like a confession:
Too young to know better, too old to waste time.
I remember scribbling that down because it summed up everything. I wasn’t naive anymore, but I also didn’t want to keep losing myself in something that wasn’t real.
From there, the song started building itself — verses filled with circular images (“driving in circles,” “living in maybe”) that mirrored the loop I was trapped in. The pre-chorus became the breaking point: owning the blame, begging for honesty, but realizing that nothing was going to change.
The Chorus: Naming the Loop
When the chorus came — “You’re not an X, you’re a Y to me” — it felt like naming the truth. He wasn’t my ex, because we never really began or ended. He was my “why”: why I couldn’t move on, why I kept going back, why the story stayed unfinished.
That line anchored the whole song. It captured the ache of being more than friends, but less than lovers, stuck in a place with no definition and no closure.
Writing Through the Hurt
Songwriting for me is equal parts diary and survival. Writing Bad at Being Friends was a way of saying to myself: You’re not crazy. This loop is real. And if you can name it, you can release it.
The production stayed true to that intimacy — dance-pop leaning, but bittersweet. The beat moves like the heart racing after a midnight call, but underneath it’s laced with a kind of ache that doesn’t resolve. Because that’s how the relationship felt: fast, intoxicating, but never finished.
Why I Wanted to Share It
For anyone who’s ever been in that in-between, this song is for you. I know what it’s like to stay in a cycle that confuses you, that makes you second-guess yourself, that gives you moments of closeness without commitment.
And I know what it feels like to finally put it into words — to let the loop live inside a song, instead of inside your heart.
Sometimes songwriting isn’t about closure. It’s about creating something beautiful out of what hurt you. That’s what Bad at Being Friends is for me, I hope it can be that for you too.
LOVE,
J
