I didn't know I was creating a universe.

At first, there was just a song. 1000 Loves.

And when I look back at the song now, I realize that the world of 1000 Loves was already hiding inside it.

The idea was never simply about having loved a thousand people.

It was about what happens when you keep searching for something through other people, through desire, through obsession, through the kind of relationships you know you probably shouldn’t want — and somehow, after all those loves, all those mistakes, all those attempts to move on...you still come back to the same person.

The song has this push and pull that I love: you want me, you can’t hold me, you’re coming back, I’m not chasing you.

There is desire, but there is also power.

There is attraction, but there is distance.

There is intimacy, but there is something almost addictive about the cycle.

And that became important to me.

Because the more I listened to the song, the more I started thinking about the people who could live inside it.

Who is the woman someone can’t get over?

Who is the man who keeps coming back?

What happened between them before we ever met them?

How many people came before?

How many times did they try to leave?

How many times did they cross the same line again?

Those questions eventually became stories.

And the stories became… 1000 Loves.

That’s where You, Again came from.

But what started with one relationship couldn’t stay contained inside one relationship. The characters had histories. They had secrets. They had other loves, other versions of themselves, other lives that existed before the story began.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just writing about two people who couldn’t stay away from each other. I was writing about everything that happens between one love and the next.

That’s what 1000 Loves means to me now. Not necessarily a thousand happy endings. Not a thousand perfect romances.

A thousand loves. A thousand mistakes. A thousand versions of ourselves. A thousand reasons to walk away. And somehow... one person you still can’t stop coming back to.

That’s when I realized something:

I thought I had written a song about a love story. I had written the beginning of a universe. And maybe that’s the strange thing about music.

Sometimes you write a song. Sometimes the song writes the world.

Xo,

Maya