all my friends are fake
Song Meaning

“all my friends are fake” is Tate McRae working through her confusion about who around her is genuine after longtime friends turned their backs on her and made up things about her when she was away 1. The title came from a line she blurted out in a writing session (“it almost feels like all my friends are fake”), which her collaborators immediately locked in as the song 1. At its center is a question she kept asking: if she stripped away everything she had done in her life, would people treat her the same, or would they become completely different 1. She has said it is hard to sift real friends from fake ones, and that as a teenager she was still figuring out who might use her for the wrong reasons 1.

The meaning

The song started as an offhand remark. McRae has recalled rambling in a writing session until she hit the thought that “it almost feels like all my friends are fake,” and everyone in the room turned: “that’s it, that’s the title” 1. She wrote it quickly because fake friendships were a subject she had not touched yet, and unlike the love songs she had been writing in Los Angeles (about a feeling she said she had never even experienced), this one felt personally relatable 1.

The spark was specific. She has said a bunch of her real friends, people she had known for a super long time, “turn their backs on me and making up stuff when I was like not there anymore” 1. That left her confused, and she wrote the song to “wrap my head around it” 1. The people who actually inspired it stayed silent; friends who joked about being the fake ones were not who she meant 1.

That confusion becomes the chorus’s test. McRae has framed the song around a blunt question: “What if I stripped everything that I’ve done in my entire life, like would you still treat me the exact same way, or would you be a completely different person?” 1. The lyrics turn that into a series of hypotheticals (“What if I broke my legs? / What if I changed my name? / Would you still love me the same?”), asking whether affection survives once the image is gone. She has noted she does not consider herself famous, but some friends treat her as if she is because she has followers 1.

The suspicion also extends to new people entering her life. She has described considering a friendship only to have someone suggest a photo shoot on the first hangout, then wondering, “what do you want me to do with these photos?” 1. That kind of behavior sits behind the chorus line “They just want me for the day, day, until they don’t.” As a teenager she was still trying to figure out “who’s gonna use you for the right or wrong reasons,” and she has said it is “so hard to find real people nowadays” and hard to “sift through the real and not” when you cannot tell what anyone’s intention is 1.

The song is also about the wall that betrayal built. McRae has tied it to “my guard, and not being able to trust that many people” 1. While writing, she connected the same instinct to relationships: she will “immediately put up a wall” before even getting to know someone 1. Lines like “Sorry if I got you wrong / Didn’t mean to judge you by a cover” and “I’ve been burnt so many times / It’s hard to turn it off” capture that defensive posture. She has said trust takes time: time to get to know someone, to tell them her secrets, to share “what’s going on in my brain” 1. The pre-chorus wish for “someone, could trust ’em” sits against the admission that “loyalty don’t come for free,” which is the song’s whole problem in one line.

Last updated 2026-09-02