Songfacts®:

• The lead single from Western Stars is a mellow ballad featuring strummed acoustic guitars, moaning pedal steel and lush strings. Lyrically, the melancholic track finds Springsteen, who has "fallen in love with lonely," driving endlessly on an empty road.
• Springsteen said in a 2017 interview with Variety that Western Stars was inspired by the Southern California pop records of the 1960s and '70s by artists such as Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. Springsteen added that he wrote most of the record in the early 2010s, stopped work on it to make 2012's Wrecking Ball, then returned to it.
  
  This tune reflects the influences Springsteen mentioned, incorporating Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell's lonesome vibe and the orchestration of Burt Bacharach's pop hits.
• Many of the songs on Western Stars are about a wayfarer giving in to wanderlust and enduring loneliness. Jimmy Webb told Uncut magazine he was particularly with impressed with this ode to those happy moments that never seem to last as long as you'd like.
  
  "I was amazed at how he locked on to the sensual pleasure that can be derived from loneliness," said Webb. "From what Warren Zevon used to call 'splendid isolation.' And yet, at the same time, he's recognizing there's a danger there. There's a dark side. That lonely road has its appeal but at the same time, he's calling you: don't get too far out there as you might not be able to get back. That's so intense and personal."