Is It In Me?

Lore & Background

The song sits in the middle stretch of *Radical Optimism*, a period in Lipa's career where she was deliberately widening her sonic vocabulary beyond the 2020 disco-pop of *Future Nostalgia*. By the time she reached the writing and production sessions for this album, she had expressed interest in working with artists who occupied a different register—more conceptual, more theatrical, more willing to let a track breathe in silence. David Byrne, with his decades of experience bending pop structure into something almost literary, was a natural fit for a song that wanted to sound less like a hit and more like a thought. Lyrically, the track orbits a single, deceptively simple question: is the feeling, the drive, the thing you're reaching for, actually inside you, or are you performing it for an audience that expects it to be there? The phrasing is deliberately open—"it" could be love, ambition, authenticity, or simply the will to keep going. Byrne's contribution, when it arrives, adds a layer of dry, sardonic commentary that keeps the song from tipping into pure melancholy. The result is a track that feels more like a two-person argument with the self than a conventional ballad. In fan communities, "Is It In Me?" has a particular reputation: it is the track people send to a friend who is overthinking, the one that gets tagged in playlists titled "songs that sound like 1 a.m. in a parking garage." It is not the album's anchor single, but for a segment of the fanbase it is the most *honest* track on the record—the one where the production steps back and lets the doubt stand unadorned.

In Their Own Story

The studio is dim. There's a half-empty glass of something amber on the console, and the room smells like cold coffee and ozone from the monitors. Dua is sitting cross-legged on the floor, not at the mic, just… listening to the loop she built that afternoon. It's minimal. A kick, a muted snare, a synth pad that sounds like it's being played through a phone speaker. She hums a line, stops, shakes her head. "No, it's too… resolved." She wants the question to stay a question. David Byrne is in the booth, or maybe just in the room—hard to tell. He's been muttering syllables, testing the weight of words the way a jeweler tests a stone. He says a line, almost off-mic, and they both go quiet. Dua nods slowly. "Yeah. That's the one. That's the… the shrug." They don't fix it. They don't punch in. They let the imperfection sit in the take because the imperfection *is* the point. The song, in that moment, stops being a pop record and becomes a small, honest conversation between two people who have both spent careers learning that the audience expects a punchline, and neither of them is going to give one.

Reader's Guide

If "Is It In Me?" were a person, it would be the friend who shows up to your party in an oversized coat, sits on the kitchen floor, and asks you the one question you've been avoiding. It's not loud. It doesn't need to be. The hook is the question itself—repeated, slightly shifted each time, never quite answered. It's less a melody you hum in the shower and more a thought you circle at 2 a.m. The writing session, as fans and press have described the album's process, leaned into collaboration with artists outside Lipa's usual pop orbit, and Byrne's presence gives the track a theatrical, almost theatrical-punk energy that no amount of production polish could replicate. The music video and visual treatment lean into the album's broader aesthetic of bold color and surreal staging, but this track's direction feels more restrained, more like a single long take in a half-lit room. The chart trajectory was modest compared to the album's lead singles; it never became a radio staple. And that's precisely why fans love it. It's the deep cut that rewards a second listen, a third listen, a listen where you're not trying to dance but trying to *feel* something you can't name. It became a cultural touchstone in a small, specific way: the song you recommend to someone who says they don't really get Dua Lipa, because here she's not performing. She's asking.

Did You Know?

• David Byrne, the featured artist, is best known as the frontman and primary songwriter of the Talking Heads, one of the most influential art-rock bands of the 1980s.
• The song's title is a question, which is unusual in Lipa's catalog where most track titles are declarative statements or imperatives (e.g., "Houdini," "Training Season," "Levitating").
• The track sits on *Radical Optimism*, an album Lipa described as a deliberate expansion beyond the disco-pop sound of her previous record, incorporating more experimental and art-adjacent production.
• The song's lo-fi, stripped-back production is a noticeable contrast to the high-gloss, dance-floor-oriented sound that defined her 2020 era, making it one of the most texturally distinct tracks in her discography.