Songfacts®:

• Elliott Murphy can't remember exactly what he was thinking when he wrote a lot of his songs, especially his older ones, but that's not the case with this one. In talking with Songfacts, he explained that he recalls exactly where he was.
  
  "True story," Murphy said, "I was walking down Third Avenue around Gramercy Park where I use to live in the early 1980s. I stopped at a red light and there were these two young beautiful Puerto Rican girls standing next to me and suddenly one of them says, 'When you go out with a bad boy...' And the other one finished her sentence: 'You do things you thought you wouldn't do!'
  
  I have no idea what they were talking about, but I turned right around and went home to my little apartment and wrote that song. Those girls' remarks sparked that song and they will never know it."
• Describing the song, Murhpy said, "There's a Fitzgeraldian tone to the song, about a party gone wrong and a doomed heroine. Also, I was living in East Hampton and sometimes we would take midnight swims in the ocean, a dangerous thing to do after a night of partying."
• Murphy feels that the lyric "There's not a word of truth in anything I say, and I can't tell a lie - I was brought up that way" might be his "most telling line."