Songfacts®:

• This is about a guy who had a girlfriend, but had to let her go. He thought she deserved better, and they both knew that the love wasn't real. When he dreams, he calls out her name; he's still in love with her and he sees her face everywhere. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Michelle - Anaheim, CA
• According to the liner notes in Journey's compilation Time3, during the band's three-month vacation following the "Escape" tours, their keyboard player Jonathan Cain listened to a lot of Beatles records. He played the chords for this song on the piano in his front room one afternoon for lead singer Steve Perry. "He could magically weave a melody over anything I could play," Cain said. Eventually released as the fourth single off Frontiers, it is one of Perry's personal favorites.
• In his Songfacts interview, Jonathan Cain talked about what inspired this song. "I had a girlfriend when I was a teenager and somebody had called backstage to one of the shows and said, 'Virginia still talks about you and your relationship.' It was just one of those offhanded comments. I looked at her and just said, 'Send her my love.'
  
  I walked out, and it hit me: 'Wait a minute, that's a song!'
  
  I went home and I called Steve Perry up and I said I came up with this idea, and we wrote it on the spot. A lot of this stuff we wrote was just on the spot. Very, very spontaneous. We kind of wrote with an urgency because we didn't have a lot of time together. The road was hard enough. When we did write, we wrote very intense. All the lyrics were, like, within hours. We didn't mess around."