Songfacts®:

• This uptempo track with doleful lyrics balances out some of the slower songs on Young Love, which is Kearney's fourth album. The Oregonian singer told us: "'Ships In The Night,' with that beat... you put it on and it is undeniable. Bam. Five seconds in you're bobbing your head and you're hooked in with the texture in the song. And then you start listening to the story and you're like, Aw, this is kind of sad. You say things like, How many of our parents have made it anyway? Like, we're just fumbling through the gray, that kind of thing. Like, whoa, did you just say that?" (here's our full Mat Kearney interview.)
• Kearney explained the meaning of this relationship-difficulty song to AbsolutePunk: "I wrote that about those people that are closest to you but you still feel so far away from sometimes. It's my cry to want to connect with someone that's close to you but emotionally very far away. I'm writing out of my own experience with that."
• The phrase "like ships that pass in the night" is generally used for people who meet once or twice by chance for a short time but then do not see each other again.