LIKE I WANT YOU
Song Meaning

LIKE I WANT YOU is about pretending you are fine after a breakup when you are still stuck missing the other person 1. Giveon has said the song is not about bad blood between exes, but about someone lying and pretending they are good 1. He wrote it from a friend’s experience, capturing the inability to stop missing someone and the question of whether the other person is lying the same way 1. The verses stay calm and composed, then the hook breaks as a cry-out when the narrator can no longer hide those feelings 1.

The meaning

Giveon has said what the song is about “in the first place” is “just me pretending” 1. It is not a song about leftover hostility. “This song isn’t even about bad blood,” he explained. “There’s no bad blood between the two. It’s just like someone’s lying and pretending that they’re good” 1. He wrote it from a friend’s experience rather than his own breakup 1, and he wanted the writing to “sound like dialogue” and “a real conversation” 1.

That mask sits in the line “I say I’m happy but I’m still stuck on us.” Giveon said “stuck” comes from a feeling anyone who misses someone knows: wishing you could “just turn that shit off” and being unable to 1. The narrator is “trying your hardest to be over it, but in reality, you’re still reminiscing on it all” 1. Under that composure is the question he is really asking: “I have this feeling that I miss you, and I’m reminiscing about you. Do you also feel that way? Are you lying like I’m lying?” 1.

The arrangement follows the same split. Giveon described the verse as “you calm, you pretending, you chillin’,” then the hook as the moment “I can’t hold that in no more” 1. Seeing the other person “face to face” brings back “the days we used to be,” but the narrator “can’t make a scene.” Giveon put it this way: when you see that person, you go through those emotions again, “but you don’t let it be known” 1. The hook is supposed to feel “big, like a moment, like a cry out, like a big sigh” 1.

The second verse is the ask for honesty. Giveon framed it as having said what needed to be said, then demanding the other person’s point of view: “Trying to get the confirmation that it’s over with. It’s like that closure that you’re seeking” 1. “Tell me, am I to blame?” and “You’re so good with change” sit in that conversation, including the extra wound of an ex who seems unmoved. Giveon noted that if you break up and the other person is “not affected by it at all, that’s almost worse than the breakup itself” 1. He also described a line as “kinda manipulative,” capturing how people “guilt trip a lot” after a split 1.

Giveon treated the song like a soundtrack to what was happening at that time 1: a calm performance of being over it, then a hook that finally lets the want show.

Last updated 2026-09-02