Songfacts®:

• Kristine W wrote this song with Robert Dougan, who produced the track. The lyrics were inspired by her experiences in Las Vegas, where Kristine went to college after she earned scholarship money by winning the Miss Washington pageant. The city is glamourous and exciting, but there is also a dark undercurrent of poverty and despair, which can be a lot to handle when you're struggling to make a living among fierce competition. In our interview with Kristine W, she explained: "You see a lot of people that come to Vegas, they're going to win the big one, and they gamble and gamble and gamble until they have nothing. And you see them out there. I especially saw them at UNLV because they always ended up on the corner of Tropicana and Maryland Parkway. They'd have the cardboard signs, 'I just need enough money to get to this,' or 'I just need a sandwich.' Well, yeah."
• Kristine released a new version of this song, re-titled "I Get Up," on her 2012 compilation New & Number Ones. Some of the lyrics were rewritten for the digital age, with Kristine singing, "don't text me, don't tell me, I've got to get up." She told us: "Now we're barraged with even more. You find out somebody's dead like two seconds after they die. It's made reality just in your face, and everything's instant.
  
  So I thought that song is more powerful now, because it's even more relevant now with the economy being so bad, and "there's a man and every day I see him on the street and he's asking for change and he looks my age." It's more relevant now than it ever was. That story was probably not really listened to then because it wasn't as in your face, the economy wasn't as harsh and beaten down as it is right now. So I just thought, I'm going to take that song, I'm going to add to it, and I'm going to reframe it. And I'm really proud of how it turned out."