Songfacts®:

• The song is about a relationship that has been through the wringer; the singer is looking to give it another try, approaching it from a different angle: "Think of me as your friend."
  
  Melissa Manchester wrote the song with Carole Bayer Sager; both were struggling in their marriages, which informed the lyric. "It's very conversational because all of our songs came out of conversations, and at the time we were young married women trying to navigate some stormy waters in our young marriages, trying to find language to help clarify our communication with our young husbands, and the way we would find clarity is through our songs," Manchester, who was married at the time to the manager/producer Larry Brezner, told Songfacts.
  
  Bayer Sager's marriage to record producer Andrew Sager was also crumbling, and she poured her emotions into the lyrics. "I hoped Andrew would listen to it and make an effort to help us get whatever it was we had back on track," she wrote in her memoir They're Playing Our Song. "I guess, like my dummy in a ventriloquist act I had as a kid, I was letting my lyrics do the talking for me."
  
  Both Manchester and Bayer Sager ended up getting divorced, and both remarried in 1982, Bayer Sager to Burt Bacharach.
  
  "There's a certain suggestion of world weariness in the song," Manchester added. "We wrote it as such young women, and to be singing the song decades later and to have grown into that real-world weariness is interesting and touching. It's like those young women who wrote that such a long time ago knew about what was to come."
• "Midnight Blue" was Melissa Manchester's first hit. After releasing two hitless albums on Bell Records, she signed a deal with Arista and issued the song on her third album, Melissa. "Midnight Blue" went to #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart and established Manchester as both a songwriter and artist. Her later accomplishments include co-writing the Kenny Loggins/Stevie Nicks duet "Whenever I Call You 'Friend'" and Top 10 singles as an artist with "Don't Cry Out Loud" and "You Should Hear How She Talks About You."
• Midnight blue is a real color, a very dark shade of blue evocative of the sky when illuminated only by moonlight.
• George Harrison was set to release a song called "Midnight Blue" later in 1975 on his Extra Texture album, but when Manchester's song took off, Harrison retitled his "Tired of Midnight Blue."
  
  In 1987, Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm had a hit with his "Midnight Blue."
• Other songs Carole Bayer Sager wrote with Manchester include "Just You And I," "Come In From The Rain" and "Home To Myself" - lots of confessional songs from a female perspective. Bayer Sager explained: "I think just by writing about the things we were going through, we were able to tough the hearts of women who were also struggling, so I'm very proud of those songs."
• Manchester released a new version of "Midnight Blue" as a duet with Dolly Parton in 2024. "The conventional approach to duets is usually a man and a woman, but there's a certain deepening power between two women who sing about enduring friendship and what that means," Manchester told Songfacts. "I sent it to her and she loved it. I put all of the vocal parts on it so she could learn them, and she sent me back her vocal performance, which was so gorgeous. It was so tender that it sent me back into the studio and I re-recorded my vocal to match hers emotionally."
  
  Manchester and Parton also made a video for the song where they used their formidable acting skills (did ya know that Manchester played Blossom's mom on Blossom?) to play the parts of old friends comforting each other. "You hope everybody has friends where you can bang on a door in the middle of the night and say, 'I need help,' and they open the door to you and are there for you," Manchester said. "That was the story."
  
  The video was shot at a studio in Nashville.