Jess Glynne shares the story of how she wrote and recorded the song “Hold My Hand” with Jack from Clean Bandit on Billboard‘s How It Went Down. She shares the spontaneity of the song’s lyrics coming together, how it’s remained relevant four years after its release and more!

Jess Glynne:
Hey, I’m Jess Glynne, and this is How It Went Down from my song “Hold My Hand.”

“Hold My Hand,” I wrote in probably the end of 2014. I’ll never forget that day, actually. I was with my friend Din Din, and we were in the car driving to Kilburn in London, to go to the studio to meet Jack from Clean Bandit who I had “Rather Be” with.

I don’t know, like how it came about, but “darlin’ hold my hand” came up in the car. We were talking about what we wanted to say, I think, in the song or what we were kind of going into the session with. I think we were just having a real, like, friendship moment in the car. And by the time we got to the studio, we kind of had, like, an idea of what we wanted to say. And that was like, when you’re feeling kind of like the outcast in a room, there’s one person that you know, has always got you.

It was kind of crazy. The song came together so quickly, we kind of gave him that idea and what have you, and he just sat at the piano in the corner of the room. We were sat on this little sofa and he just started playing. Dun dun dun, dun dun dun and everything just went like that. As they say, the rest genuinely was history. It was just like the song just fell out of our kind of mouth, I guess. The lyrics were there, the message was there. And it was like a moment where we left that session knowing that we just done something really special.

And it still took a while to actually finish the record, like, after we’ve kind of started it because we went back in again to add to the chorus because it’s like we heard the heard the song, like, maybe a week or two in, and it was like something was missing. And then we kind of invited someone else in with fresh ears because sometimes it really jars you when you listen to a song loads of time.

Watch the full video above!