Songfacts®:

• The title track to Cheap Trick's second album, "Heaven Tonight" is "a dark song about overdosing," according to Tom Werman, who produced the album. It's a dirge-like song where lead singer Robin Zander takes the voice of temptation, asking, "Would you like to go to heaven tonight?" The song is a warning not to give in.
• "Heaven Tonight" was written by Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen and bass player Tom Petersson. Nielsen used an electric mandocello on the track, which is like a baritone mandolin. He used an acoustic version of the instrument on an earlier Cheap Trick song, appropriately titled "Mandocello."
• The big hit from the album was "Surrender," but it wasn't very big, topping out at #62 in 1978. But then Cheap Trick went to Japan and played two shows at the Budokan temple that they packaged into a live album released in America in 1979 as At Budokan. The live version of "I Want You To Want Me" blew up, igniting interest in the band and bumping sales of the Heaven Tonight album, which went on to sell over a million copies in America.
• Tom Werman, who also produced Ted Nugent and Molly Hatchet around this time, says that this is one of the few songs he worked on where the lyrics influenced his production style. "You would want to have an eerie, depressing, foreboding feel to the music, and we did that," Werman explained to Songfacts. "Some of the vocal lines, it would get loud and it would get very quiet."