Songfacts®:

• Phil Collins sang on this with Bailey, who is a vocalist with Earth, Wind & Fire. Collins produced and played drums on Chinese Wall, and after recording the album, he and bass player Nathan East agreed that it didn't have a song with enough commercial appeal to release as a single, so they sat down and wrote "Easy Lover." It does not have deep lyrical content: The song is about a captivating woman who cannot be tamed.
• Philip Bailey revealed the story behind the song in Musician magazine: "Phil and Nathan were playing around with a riff on the piano and I was walking around singing 'Choosy Lover' over the piano chords. We worked on it all day and put a rough version of it down on tape. The next day we said, 'let's check it out so we can go in and record it.' When we heard it, we realized there was nothing wrong with it. We tried doing it again, but we kept the original."
• Phil Collins told his side of the story when he spoke with Rolling Stone in 2016. Said Collins: "I always loved Earth, Wind & Fire, and in 1984 I was asked if I would produce Philip Bailey's solo album. People were leaning on him, racially - 'Don't come back with a white album. You're one of us.' So Philip got Nathan East to play on it also. We hit some rocky ground early on, but we worked everything out. Near the end of the sessions, Philip said, 'We haven't written anything together on this album.'
  
  So we just started having a jam one night, and went round and round and turned it into a verse and a chorus. We recorded it that night so we wouldn't forget it. That song doesn't sound like any particular era. It's just fantastic. The hip-hop brigade fell in love with me after 'Easy Lover.' They were like, 'Where'd that come from? That ain't black music and that ain't white music. That's kind of an interesting color of beige.'"
• The video won the 1985 MTV award for Best Overall Performance.
• Phil Collins doesn't get a lot of play in dance clubs, but this song did pretty well in discos, which often played a remix by John Potoker that was released as a 12" single in 1984. Potoker, who later did a remix of "Sussudio," and also Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," incorporated a drum track into the mix that Collins had used as a guide track.