Songfacts®:

• Along with the rest of the Life, Death, Love and Freedom album, this song was produced by T-Bone Burnett (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, The Wallflowers). The track has a 1950s vibe, with Mellencamp singing about the perils of falling in love.
• This features background vocals from Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild.
• The Life, Death, Love and Freedom album was the first ever to be released in the CODE format. This is a proprietary audio technology, which according to the album's press release was developed by T-Bone Burnett and his team of engineers to create high-definition audio files that are virtually indistinguishable from the original master tapes.
• John Mellencamp told Billboard magazine about working with Burnett: "I've known T Bone for about 10 years... T-Bone Burnett knows more about music from 1960 backwards than anyone I have ever met. Regardless of how the record turned out, he and I became very good friends. Our friendship became more important than the record. It's very rare that you make a musical friend."
• Mellencamp discussed the Life Death Love and Freedom album with Billboard: "All of these songs were written in a 15-day period. I had no intention of writing songs for a record; (they) just sort of happened. One would be making an error to personalize these songs too much. (They) were written in the American Songbook tradition."
• Mellencamp told Rolling Stone: "The album title is perfect - Life, Death, Love and Freedom. If you listen to Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, those were traditional topics in American folk songs - the songs are about the parts of life that most people don't really want to discuss. Which doesn't necessarily work for pop music that record companies really want to put out. I made this album for me."