Olivia Rodrigo in interviews about writing "Can't Catch Me Now", from Lucy Gray Baird's perspective:
"It was a wonderful experience to try to write something from the character of Lucy Gray".
Lucy Gray is a character she feels very connected to.
"So while it was very much about Lucy Gray, i think i injected parts of myself into it too. I saw bits of myself in her; i admired her resilience, so i tried to embody all that and put it into the song".
With the song, Lucy Gray became the muse.
Francis Lawrence talking to Olivia about the song: "I remember I sort of talked at her for 45 minutes". “About the movie and about the themes and about the ending, and the mystery at the end, and how I thought the song should feel in terms of being a little haunting, and what it could do for us narratively with lyrics. She took a bunch of notes."
"Can't Catch Me Now" is just as haunting and mesmerizing as Lawrence wished: a crooned epilogue for Lucy Gray's story.
His inspiration: "one of the last scenes was very inspiring to me. It's an overhead shot of a bunch of birds in the trees, and something very important just happened, that was playing in a loop in my head over and over, and I was like, i want to write a song that captures what that feeling is".
(Producer) Dan Nigro and Olivia wrote the Hunger Games theme song in a beautiful studio overlooking the ocean, something they actually rarely do. "But I like to think that any of the interesting qualities of that song come from where it was written."
In the scene that was inspired when she wrote the lyrics: "There's Blood on the Side of the Mountain": —"There's a scene in the movie where it's kind of a breaking point for Lucy's character and something changes dramatically. There's a touch headshot of all these trees and birds coming in and out. It was my favorite part of the movie because it shows her resilience and her fight against her defense. I love that feeling, so when I wrote the song I had that image in my head the whole time and I tried to capture it".
"I really wanted the song to be super dynamic, especially when it's for a movie like The Hunger Games, there's a lot of space for some drama. So I think the vocals added this lush soundscape that swells, pulls back and gives it these dynamics I was really into. Watching the movie, there's a lot of Appalachian folk songs that Lucy sings and I was really inspired by those songs; I think they're really incredible. So I think the second I watched it, I knew I wanted to make a song in that vein".
She started the writing process for “Can’t Catch Me Now” from scratch after watching the movie and collecting her thoughts.
She listened to a lot of Simon and Garfunkel, Carole King and Joni Mitchell while writing her album Guts and The Hunger Games Song.
"Especially with the Hunger Games song, it was very insular in the way I wrote it. Though I guess I went back and edited it a bunch; it was one of those songs where I worked on it, set it down for like a month, picked it back up. We definitely refined it for a while".
