We threw a big New Years Party in London this year and I was thinking about how everybody talks and things about who you’ll kiss at midnight, it’s this big romantic idea, like, “Who you’re gonna kiss at midnight? Ring in the New Year.” And I think that’s very romantic, but I think there’s something even more romantic about who’s gonna deal with you on New Year’s Day. Who’s willing to give you advil and help you clean up the house. I think that states more of a permanence. And so, I was thinking about that and I wrote this song called “New Year’s Day.” There’s are two lines in this song that I’d been saving for a really long time for the right moment and I just picked them for this song and I’m really excited about them, and the first one is: “Please, don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere,” and the other one is: “Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you.”

— Via reputation Secret Sessions

Jack told Entertainment Weekly:

It was the quickest [song to record]. If you listen to the piano on that record, you can hear me moving around. You hear things clicking. Those are the ‘scratch takes’ — we did that very quickly. It came out in that sort of goofy Hollywood version of how music is written, where it comes out of moments of inspiration. Part of the process is you do that [scratch take], and then you do it for real. But we just sat there: That’s the song. You want a song to sound like itself. You don’t want to get the perfect tune. You don’t want to get the absolute perfect vocal take or the perfect panning or compression. You just want it to sound like itself. You want to feel like you’re home within the song. […] I don’t know what we would be thinking if we tried to fuck with it. I’m so proud of it because, personally, I think it’s some sort of hint at the future.