“Accident starts at the beginning, in that clumsy first stretch where it feels like more could go wrong than right. The sex is good, could it be better? Your friends are cool, could they be cooler? You start inventing flaws in the person. You compare them to others, to people from past relationships, thinking: with so-and-so I wouldn't be dealing with this. And yet, back when you were with so-and-so, you wanted none of it either. The grass is always greener.

Then it ends, and the cycle flips. Now you're doing to them what you used to do to everyone else. You idealize them, sure you'll never find anyone like them again. You wait by the sideline, hoping for a call, telling yourself the breakup was just an accident.

Most songs stop there. I wanted to write the aftermath. You've made the positive supercut, you've blamed yourself for all that comparing, convinced you lost someone wonderful. Then you find out they were never all that. They were worse. Awful in every possible way. The fun of this song is that it keeps changing its testimony. I start out with I ruined everything because I'm impossible, and halfway through I remember the evidence. The second verse is that realization arriving: why did I ever think it was me? The chorus turns around with it, and the last one cross-examines the title. Breaking up was no accident at all. The bridge says what the accident really was: you. Missing somebody never retroactively turns the breakup into a mistake.

Musically it sits in a brisk, staccato synthpop pocket on purpose. All that self-interrogation was supposed to feel quick and a little sharp, never mournful.

And then the part I care about most. You're grateful you got out, and you even feel bad for whoever's with them now. You hope they don't destroy her. You hope they learn to love themselves someday.

It walks through every stage after a relationship with someone who turns out to be, honestly, trash. Abusive or not. It also carries the duality of what happens in Inches, on the other side of the record, the story that gets told about who left whom, which this side hadn't touched until here. And it opens the stretch of songs that Somebody's Ordinary later closes: comparison, idealization, discovery, and what survives after all of it.”