While listening to Em Beihold‘s super-catchy breakthrough hit “Numb Little Bug,” you might have noticed something unusual: The song’s title doesn’t actually appear in the lyrics until the final line of the song. That’s because initially, the song wasn’t called “Numb Little Bug” — until she accidentally gave it that title.
“So, I had posted the chorus of the song on TikTok, and as I do with all my little snippets that I’m teasing, I always just say one little line before it,” Em tells ABC Audio. “And I had basically said, ‘The past few months, I’ve been a numb little bug And so I wrote a song about it.'”
“‘Numb Little Bug’ was not a lyric in the song at the time,” she points out. But fans just assumed it was the title, she says, ” And then everyone [was] like, “We want ‘Numb Little Bug!'”
This caused Em and her co-writers to go back to the drawing board and somehow reverse engineer the song to include those three words in the lyrics.
“So, knowing that we wanted to call the song, ‘Numb Little Bug,’ I had basically told the writers, ‘We don’t have ‘Numb Little Bug’ in here, but we kind of have to fit it in somehow!'” Em explains. “And we’d already written the chorus and the post-chorus, and it just was like, ‘How do we do it?'”
And according to her, “The outro just seemed like the safest choice.”
“Numb Little Bug,” inspired by Em’s experience of being on anti-depressants while struggling with depression and anxiety, has gone gold. Her follow-up, “Too Precious,” which she released last Friday, hit one million views on YouTube in just five days.
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