Songfacts®:

• Taylor Swift joins Gracie Abrams for this mournful indie-pop postmortem on a love affair gone south. Both singers are like lovelorn detectives piecing together the fragments of their union. They grapple with a potent mix of regret and longing, questioning if their exes miss their relationship like they do.
• Abrams throws in a juicy detail on the bridge.
  
  Robert Bly on my nightstand, gifts from you, how ironic
  The curse or a miracle, hearse or an oracle
  
  Apparently, the former boyfriend was a bit of a Bly devotee. For those unfamiliar with the poet Robert Bly's work, he is best known for his 1990 tome Iron John: A Book About Men, which championed a recovery of a pre-industrial conception of masculinity through camaraderie with other men in male-only gatherings. Was Abrams' ex struggling to connect with his inner caveman?
• From April to August 2023, Abrams served as the opening act for select dates on the North American leg of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The seeds of "Us" were sown during this period.
  
  One night after a show, both Abrams and Swift decided to swap creative currency. They previewed songs from their upcoming albums: Abrams' The Secret of Us and Swift's The Tortured Poets Department.
  
  Then they started listening to instrumental tracks created by their mutual friend and collaborator, Aaron Dessner. "Something caught our ear at the same time very hard and fast," Abrams recalled to Billboard. "So we ran to the piano and started writing this song... I used to fantasize about that kind of a thing as a kid."
  
  "Us" became the linchpin for The Secret Of Us. It tied together the musical threads she'd been weaving with Dessner at his Long Pond Studios, all while processing the summer spent opening for Swift.
• Later, the two artists headed upstate to record the duet with Dessner, who recalled: "It was just really fun to watch the chemistry of Gracie and Taylor bouncing off each other, Gracie in total wonder and awe watching how Taylor records and produces her vocal performances and builds the world."
  
  "Taylor's brilliant at synthesizing a whole story," Dessner continued. "[That song] just brought everything [about Gracie's album] into focus in a beautiful way."