page_title: On My Mind (Ellie Goulding song)
section_title: Composition and lyrics
hierarchical_section_title: On My Mind (Ellie Goulding song) / Composition and lyrics
caption_attribution_description: Ed Sheeran
context_page_description: "On My Mind" is a song by English singer Ellie Goulding from her third studio album, Delirium. It was released as the album's lead single on 17 September 2015. It was written by Goulding, Max Martin, Savan Kotecha and Ilya Salmanzadeh. "On My Mind" is an electropop and R&B song whose instrumentation consists of scratchy guitars, trap drums, slapped beats and sharp, syncopated electronica. Lyrically, "On My Mind" talks about a one-night stand with someone the protagonist should not be with, having a dichotomy between heart and head. Though firmly denied by Goulding, many critics considered it an answer song to Ed Sheeran's "Don't".
  The song received positive reviews from music critics, who praised it for being a radio-friendly song, as well as Goulding's vocals. Multiple critics found it similar to The Police's "Message in a Bottle". Commercially, "On My Mind" became another top-10 entry in the United Kingdom, as well as in Australia and other five territories, while reaching the top 20 in other seven countries. In the United States, it reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
context_section_description: "On My Mind" was written by Goulding, Savan Kotecha, Max Martin, and Ilya Salmanzadeh, with the latter two serving as the song's producers. According to the sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., the song is written in the key of D minor, with a moderate tempo of 156 beats per minute. Goulding's vocal range spans from D4 to D5. It is an electropop and R&B song, with its instrumentation consisting in scratchy guitar, slapped beats, trap drums and sharp, syncopated electronica, which according to Idolator's Bianca Gracie, "gladly strays away from the rush of breezy synths that is currently ruling the genre." Matthew Norton of NME described it as "hyperactive, insistent R&B with a bit of Rihanna in the 'eh's", while Steven J. Horowitz of Billboard and Maeve McDermott of USA Today both perceived that its "wangy guitars" resemble The Police's "Message in a Bottle". During the song, Goulding takes a "plain-speaking" approach, while towards the end she goes in a "conciliatory" direction. 
  Lyrically, it talks about a one-night stand, presenting a dichotomy between heart and head, when we are with someone we shouldn't be with, or we want to be with someone we shouldn't be with. Though denied by Goulding, "On My Mind" was described by many critics as an answer song to Ed Sheeran's "Don't" (2014). According to Horton, while in "Don't", Sheeran sings, "Don't fuck with my love", Goulding responds in "On My Mind", "You don't mess with love/You mess with the truth". Q described it as a "guitar led, Swiftian tale of a drunken hook up with a tattooed admirer" inspired by a time when she was "on tour, drinking too much and going off the rails". Goulding commented to MTV News about its lyrical content, claiming:
  "I think lyrically a lot of my fans will go back to when I first started releasing songs even on to Myspace and things like that because I was very explicit and honest with my lyrics and I would literally just sing what I was thinking. I think it's genuinely gone back to that. I think for the past couple of years I've maybe been filtering out lyrics quite a bit and going for a more typical kind of pop structure, but this song, we had so much fun writing it, it just comes back to that basic thing of having that person just constantly stuck in our heads." [...] "I'm sorry to all the people that want it to be about someone — it's not, it's like a myth." "I like guys with tattoos, my boyfriend has tattoos…but I don't mind. People can read into it however they want. It's fun to do that, I would do that too."
caption: Though denied by Goulding, a handful of critics considered "On My Mind" an answer song to Ed Sheeran's "Don't".
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