I Got Here by Accident

Kalie Shorr is no stranger to vulnerability—so much so that she named her 2019 album, a concept record grappling with the end of a long-term relationship and the death of Shorr’s sister, *Open Book*. On her Butch Walker-produced EP *I Got Here by Accident*, Shorr remains unapologetically open, though this time around she gets to have a little fun, too. Shorr and Walker go full-on pop-punk for the project, trading the twang and atmosphere of *Open Book* for crunchy guitars and tight, driving rhythm sections. “It’s just so fun to get to release something that\'s lighter, but that\'s still real and covers a lot of topics,” Shorr tells Apple Music. “So I hope that people take away that idea, that sometimes laughing about the bad things that happen to you is a great way of acknowledging their existence but not letting them bring you down.” Below, Shorr walks Apple Music through *I Got Here by Accident*. **“Amy”** “‘Amy’ is about a very traumatic experience, but it\'s told in a really humorous way. Basically, this friend just ghosted me, and I knew that she was still in my ex-boyfriend\'s orbit somehow. I started to get a vibe, and one time he and I got drinks for ‘closure,’ which we all know is not real. I just had this moment of clarity, and I was like, ‘I know about Amy.’ And he\'s like, ‘How do you know about that?’ But then, even after that, I was still in such denial thinking that a friend would do that to me. So I didn\'t finish the song because I was like, ‘I don\'t want to write an angry song that\'s speculative.’ And then my boyfriend was like, ‘You should put that on TikTok. I think people will like it.’ And then it got three million views and there was a whole kerfuffle. I have not heard from Amy, but I know she\'s seen it.” **“I Heard You Got a Girl”** “When you\'re writing a melody that\'s that complex, you can\'t put an extra syllable in the way that you could in the beginning of the verse. You could probably bend some rules, but it\'s so rigid and you have to figure out how to say exactly what you mean in such an intense structure and such a rigid structure. So the fact that we did that and I also got ‘insatiable’ and ‘placate’ in the same sentence, I was pretty stoked about that one.” **“I Hate the Way This Feels”** “That one has a happy ending as well, which I love. But it is very much the closest I\'ll get to a love song, because love songs are difficult for me. I think that so many of the ones I hear are pretty one-dimensional. And I really love ones that incorporate the full spectrum, because no relationship is all sunshine and rainbows, and no process of falling in love is, either. If it is, you\'re probably lying to yourself a little bit.” **“Love Child”** “It was me, Eric Dodd, and Bruce Wallace. And we were just so ecstatic to be together in person. And I think it made the energy that already exists from songwriting with your close friends, it just made it so much bigger because we missed it so much. I wanted to write a song about my childhood and acknowledge the good parts of it. Because even though it was pretty rough, there\'s still good things in all of it that made me who I am. It ended up evolving into this way larger story arc and ended up being a three-minute autobiography.” **“Alibi”** “I wrote ‘Alibi’ with my boyfriend, Sam Varga, and my friend Candi Carpenter. I love that I\'m able to have songs that they wrote on the EP since they both have songs that are about them. Candi co-wrote ‘Amy,’ I co-wrote ‘I Hate the Way This Feels’ about Sam, and then Sam and I wrote ‘Alibi’ about Candi. Sam and I were talking and I was like, ‘There\'s this one friend I have, and I don\'t necessarily see her all the time and it\'s not like we talk every day, but if the police called me and asked me where she was the night of whatever, I\'d be like, oh, she was with me, we were just hanging out, and just immediately go there.’ Sam said, ‘That’s a song idea,’ so we ended up writing it.”