Songfacts®:

• This was written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell for Frankie Valli, and was included on his 1977 album Lady Put The Lights Out. Odyssey covered it later the same year and the song became their first hit.
• The song is about a girl who is unlucky in love. The singer (presumably her friend), is telling her that as a native New Yorker, she should know by now that love is as fabricated as a Broadway show, and that you have to look out for yourself in the city. It's a song about disillusionment that captures the downside of the self-reliant New York lifestyle. While it's true that if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere, nobody will help you do it.
• Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell had been writing or producing hit singles since 1965. Among their better known songs are "A Lover's Concerto" and "Attack!" for the '60s R&B girl group The Toys. The duo also wrote several hits for Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons, including "Working My Way Back To You," "Opus 17 (Don't You Worry 'Bout Me)" and "Let's Hang On (To What We've Got)." The last one was together with Bob Crewe.
• Odyssey were a New York based R&B/disco group. However none of the group were native New Yorkers. The sisters Lillian and Louise Lopez both were born in the Virgin Islands, while Tony Reynolds was a Filipino native. This was to be Odyssey's only American hit, but in the early 1980s they had a run of Top 10 hits in the UK including the chart topping "Use It Up And Wear It Out."
• This was featured in the 1978 film Eyes Of Laura Mars.