Songfacts®:

• After a promising start with his 1975 debut single "I'm On Fire," Dwight Twilley was the victim of record company problems that stalled his career, but he got back on the charts with "Girls" in 1984. In our 2010 interview with Dwight Twilley, he told us: "I'm a songwriter, so I'm always thinking about what is a song, what does a songwriter do, and really, a person who writes songs is just a communicator. A song is a communication. Sometimes it's the simplest way that you can say something that everybody knows but hasn't been said quite the same way. And so it catches their attention, and you make that little bit of communication.
  
  I remember at one point thinking to myself, it's so basic, but how many people have ever said just 'girls'? And what is that all about? What are all the good and bad and the problems, and what is that whole really confusing but really simple problem all about? And after maybe two or three weeks of going around and asking people in a dumb way, 'What's this about? What's that about?', it was like summing the whole thing up to three and a half minutes. And so it's sometimes just that simple."
• Early in his career, Twilley was signed to Shelter Records, which also home to a young Tom Petty. The two became friends, and Petty sang on some of Twilley's songs, including this one. Petty also appears in the video.
• The video for this song got a lot of attention, as it took place in a high school locker room with girls in various states of undress. Twilley told us that there was also an R-rated version of the video, saying, "The Playboy Channel put up some money, and a lot of the lovely ladies that were featured in that video were actually Playboy bunnies; that made it kind of an interesting shoot. And also it was a promotional tool, because the promotional guys would go to the radio station and say, 'We'd really like you to play this Dwight Twilley song, we'd really appreciate it if you'd add it to your playlist.' And they'd go, 'Oh, I like the song, but I don't know if it fits into our format,' or whatever. And then the promo guy would say, 'Well, tell you what, we've got a great video. Maybe that would spark you guys up, and you could go take a second look at it, go ahead and add it to your playlist.' They'd say, 'We'll I don't know.' And then our guys would say, 'Well, would you like a copy of the R-rated video?'"