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If you don’t know Nate Smith‘s back story, you may understand “World On Fire” better when you learn that he lost everything in the 2018 California Camp Fire. Of course, that only inspired an idea for his hit single. Nate and his co-writers, one of whom is a firefighter, then put their creative brains to work.

“’World On Fire’ is about when a relationship is ending, all the things that can kind of come with it. Sometimes it’s like you’ve got friendships that were built around that relationship. You’ve got places that you used to love to go like bars and different scenes and stuff. And it’s really challenging when you when you break up because those places are kind of now sort of taboo to walk into and stuff. So that’s really what the song is about is just you know how to pick up the debris after everything has fallen apart.“