Last year, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of band's hit album Riot!, Williams addressed the backlash to the song. "The thing that annoyed me was that I had already done so much soul-searching about it, years before anyone else had decided there was an issue. When the article began circulating, I sort of had to go and rehash everything in front of everybody. It was important, however, for me to show humility in that moment," she told Track 7. "I was a 17-year-old kid when I wrote the lyrics in question, and if I can somehow exemplify what it means to grow up, get information and become any shade of 'woke', then that's A-OK with me."

"The problem with the lyrics is not that I had an issue with someone I went to school with. That's just high school and friendships and breakups. It's the way I tried to call her out using words that didn't belong in the conversation. It's the fact that the story was setup inside the context of a competition that didn't exist over some fantasy romance," Williams said, adding,

"What I couldn't have known at the time was that I was feeding into a lie that I'd bought into, just like so many other teenagers—and many adults—before me. The whole, 'I'm not like the other girls' thing—this 'cool girl' religion. What even is that? Who are the gatekeepers of 'cool' anyway? Are they all men? Are they women that we've put on top of an unreachable pedestal?"

As she previously explained on Tumblr, she's not "ashamed" of the lyrics. And as Williams later told Track 7, "For whatever reason, I believe I was supposed to have written those backwards words and I was supposed to learn something from them...years later. It's made me more compassionate toward other women, who maybe have social anxieties, and toward younger girls who are at this very moment learning to cope and to relate and to connect. We're all just trying our damnedest. It's a lot easier when we have support and community with each other."

Williams added, "Vulnerability helps lay the foundation for all that."