The Beaches say writing Blame My Ex was like 'going to therapy with your best friends'

Q21:58The Beaches: How everything needed to fall apart for everything to come together

The Beaches are back with their sophomore album, Blame My Ex, and as you can probably discern from the title, it was inspired by a painful breakup experienced by the band's lead singer, Jordan Miller.

On the brightside, Jordan's heartache turned out to be a creative windfall for the Toronto-based band, leading them to write the biggest song of their career so far — the viral hit Blame Brett — and introducing them to a whole new audience.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power alongside her sister and bandmate Kylie Miller, Jordan explains the story behind Blame Brett, starting with the fact that "it's a misleading title because it's not really about Brett."

"So I had been on a couple dates with this other new guy I was seeing, and he told me he loved me, like, three dates in," Jordan recalls.

"I was like, 'Oh, man, I'm not over my ex yet and I'm starting to feel like a bad person. Should I be over him?' So I came in with this sort of idea to write a song apologizing to all the future people that I was going to see, being like, 'I'm sorry in advance. I'm probably going to break your heart because my heart has been broken lol — don't blame me though, blame my ex-boyfriend.' So the song is like a nice long setup for a joke."

The "Brett" in question is Brett Emmons, frontman of the Canadian rock band The Glorious Sons, whom Jordan met while on the road.

"I did give him a phone call," she tells Power. "I told him the concept of the song and I said, 'The tag, we were thinking, could be 'don't blame me, blame Brett.' And he sort of was like, 'Oof, there's going to be a lot of 19-year-old girls that are going to hate me.' So he was prepared for it — he gave me his consent and his blessing. He's like, 'You couldn't find another name?' And I'm like, 'Blame Brett just has really good alliteration, I don't know what to say!'"

Jordan admits that she's "the villain in the song" and that the people trying to show support by bad-mouthing her ex are missing the point of the track.

"You know, there's a lot of great breakup records out there, especially the contemporary ones, where people will dive into the relationship and what went wrong there. I'm kind of private, and I didn't want to do that, but I did want to talk about what I was feeling. So the record is a breakup album, but it's about what happens to you after a breakup."

For Kylie, it was tough to see her sister heartbroken, but she says the experience also helped the band get closer together.

"[It was] really inspiring to all of us that Jordan was able to channel such a hard period into something so positive," Kylie tells Power. "To come into the studio every day and write about what you're going through is not an easy feat. It's basically like going to therapy with your best friends every single day."

"It was a really sad and devastating time for me," says Jordan. "There still is a little bit of humour in [Blame Brett] with the chorus, but it is really about me just not being over him."

WATCH | Tom Power's interview with The Beaches:

The full interview with The Beaches is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with The Beaches produced by Vanessa Nigro.