Songfacts®:

• Group members Jeff Carlisi and Don Barnes wrote this song with Jim Peterik, who was a member of the band Survivor. 38 Special's first hit was "Hold On Loosely," which Peterik wrote for Survivor - the bands were on the same label, and when the song didn't make Survivor's album, it went to 38 Special. This led to a collaboration between Carlisi, Barnes and Peterik, who wrote many of the hits for 38 Special. Don Barnes told Songfacts how the song came together:
  
  "We had been on the road for nine months. We were promoting the previous album. So after the nine-month tour, everybody was just ragged out and tired. Everybody took their little week vacation. But the thing about this business is, you have to be five steps ahead of yourself. You've got deadlines. You've got record companies waiting for a release date and all that. We were contractually obligated to have an album out six months from then, on a deadline, and none of us had an idea or one note that was going on this album.
  
  I was in a relationship, and it had soured and finished, but I was dating this woman. Just off the top of my head, I said, 'You know, I just can't seem to get any work done. It seems like I'm just so caught up in you all the time.'
  
  That was like a little light bulb that went on. I thought, that's a pretty good title. It's a positive thing. It's a good perspective. It has happiness and joy to it.
  
  Jim Peterik and I and Jeff Carlisi, the guitar player for the band, set out to put something together that had joy to it - a new relationship. 'I'm caught up in you, I never did suspect a thing. It's all happened without me,' unbeknownst to me kind of thing."
• Jim Peterik told Songfacts about writing for both Survivor and 38 Special: "There was a lot of resentment that I was writing songs not only for Survivor, but I was writing them with 38 Special too. I'm talking about resentment from my own band, Survivor. What I tried to explain to them, which fell on deaf ears, was that the .38 songs would never have been right for Survivor. They came from another place in me and were very much a product of the synergy of Don Barnes, Jim Peterik and Jeff Carlisi. All they could see was competition on the charts from someone who wrote the songs for both bands. When 38 Special came in to write for the next record, I was kind of sneaking around. Survivor didn't even know 38 Special was in town. We had to find places to write songs. We couldn't go to the band house, and at my house, what if one of the guys stopped over? So we went to my mother's house and wrote in the basement. We were writing 'Caught Up In You' in this gloomy room in my mother's basement all dark and dank, and we're writing this hit song. I was feeling like the bad kid playing hooky or something." (Jim is author of the book Songwriting For Dummies.)
• Frankie Sullivan of Survivor is also a credited writer on this song, which is a source of contention between him and Jim Peterik. According to Peterik, Sullivan demanded the credit because he thought it used a chord progression for a song they were writing with Survivor called "Take it All." In his autobiography, Peterik wrote: "Even though there was no solid evidence to the similarity, I got 38 to agree to cut him in to the copyright just to avoid a lawsuit."
• "Caught Up In You" released on the band's fifth album, Special Forces, in 1982. They had a few hits at this point, including "Rockin' Into the Night" and "Hold on Loosely," but "Caught Up In You" was their first to crack the Top 10. The band is from Jacksonville, Florida and steeped in Southern Rock, but they developed a more melodic sound that delivered lots of pop appeal.
• The music video takes place in a club where the band is playing the song and a very pretty girl is fielding offers from various guys. The girl in the video is Shari Shattuck, a model who had been on the cover of Playboy (April 1980). She went on to do a lot of acting, most notably a run on the soap opera The Young and the Restless in the late '90s.
  
  According to Shattuck, the band had been on the road for a while and used the time to relax, not work. "They spent their time off in a 'green room' and were very difficult to get to the set," she told Noblemania. "It was a bit annoying, but I understood that they had been on tour and were exhausted. This was fun time for them, so there was a good bit of drinking and joking around."
• The bridge in this song ("And if ever comes a day...") is so good, they repeated it twice; it bookends the guitar solo.
• The music video earned lots of airplay on MTV because they didn't have many to choose from in 1982, which was just a year after they launched. European acts had been making videos for years, but American artists typically didn't because there weren't many places to see them pre-MTV. 38 Special's label, A&M, were ahead of the curve and had the band make videos with production value and storylines, which worked out very well for them. In 1982, there was no way MTV was going to turn down a decent video for a catchy song by an American rock band, especially if it starred a Playboy model.
• The video was shot at a club in Atlanta in a two-day shoot when their video for "You Keep Runnin' Away" was also shot. That video is a sequel to "Caught Up In You," picking up the story with the girl in her motel room with the lucky guy she chose.