Songfacts®:

• This gentle ballad is the title track from Melissa Manchester's debut album, released in 1973 when she was 22. It wasn't released as a single but carried forward as one of her favorites. In a 2024 interview with Songfacts, she said, "In that moment, that seemed to have resonated with a lot of young people. When I started, I was basically the same age as my college audiences."
• Manchester wrote this song with Carole Bayer Sager - they were one of very few all-female songwriting teams of the '70s. Bayer Sager co-wrote the 1966 hit "A Groovy Kind Of Love," recorded by The Mindbenders, but her biggest hits came years later with songs like "Nobody Does It Better" (Carly Simon) and "Heartlight" (Neil Diamond).
  
  Melissa Manchester landed her first hit in 1975 with "Midnight Blue," another song she wrote with Bayer Sager. Her later hits include "Don't Cry Out Loud" and "You Should Hear How She Talks About You."
• In her Songfacts interview, Manchester talked about the meaning behind this song: "It was in that moment in the early '70s when young women were starting to find their voice, learn that they could have a voice, learn that they could be separated out from the voices of men who were traditionally heads of families in that moment, heads of workplaces in that moment, designed the style of the workplace in that moment - all that stuff.
  
  It was a very quiet song that talked about the difference between being alone and being lonely, and the key line is, 'It's not so bad all alone coming home to myself again.' At some point all of us, men and women, have to feel the ground underneath our feet and feel that we are on steady ground, even if we emotionally don't feel we are. Something deeper has to tell us we are standing, we're in our own life, we'll figure out tomorrow tomorrow, but for right now we're where we are supposed to be, and if the next step is trembling, we'll make it through that too. That's what the song is addressing."
• Dusty Springfield recorded this song in 1974 but her version wasn't released until 2000, when it appeared on the compilation Simply... Dusty.