’I Know You Care’ is really personal and fragile for me. For me, it’s about losing a family member and also about a breakup. It’s about this idea of losing someone for good.

Ellie Goulding frames “I Know You Care” as a song rooted in two overlapping kinds of grief: bereavement and romantic separation. By pairing the loss of a family member with a breakup, she suggests that emotional absence can feel similarly final, even when the circumstances differ. The emphasis on fragility and personal stakes positions the track less as a conventional pop ballad and more as a confession about the fear that someone can vanish from your life permanently—through death, distance, or the irreversible end of intimacy. The quote highlights how the song’s power comes from its ambiguity: listeners can map their own experiences of “losing someone for good” onto it.