Songfacts®:

• Porno For Pyros loved taking surf trips to exotic locales (who wouldn't?) but they didn't always follow safety protocols. On a trip to Tahiti, their manager, Roger Leonard, went out surfing and didn't return, so lead singer Perry Farrell purloined a rickety canoe and went looking for him.
  
  Leonard showed up back at shore but Farrell didn't. His canoe fell apart and he was stranded at sea.
  
  "We had dad search teams looking for him and we couldn't find him," Pyros guitarist Peter DiStefano said in a Songfacts interview. "We thought we lost Perry."
  
  Farrell called out to the heavens, even yelling "Jesus!" even though he's Jewish. Eventually, he washed up on shore.
  
  This harrowing scare supplied the lyric for "Tahitian Moon," where he sings, "I don't know if I'll make home tonight," and recalls those moments where he was facing his death:
  
  The sea is a very easy place to disappear
  To drift away, to fall asleep, or make your peace
  
  "He had some faith," DiStefano said. "He was swimming on his back and looking up at the stars, but he thought he was going to die. He got lucky."
• "Tahitian Moon" is the most popular song on Good God's Urge, the second Porno For Pyros album. The band formed in 1992 after Perry Farrell's previous group, Jane's Addiction, split up. They released their first (self-titled) album in 1993, which includes "Pets," a song where Farrell ponders aliens. Farrell was very much involved in the Lollapalooza festival, which he started in 1991, at this time, but oddly, Porno For Pyros never played it. After Good God's Urge they had a hard time staying functional due in large part to DiStefano's drug use, and in 1997 Farrell decided to re-form Jane's Addiction instead of pushing forward with Porno For Pyros.
• Like Jane's Addiction, Porno For Pyros falls under the umbrella of "alternative" music, which is very broad but gave retailers and radio stations a way to classify them. "Tahitian Moon" is a very dynamic song, but instead of quiet verses launching into a loud chorus (a Nirvana favorite), it's the opposite. The song also has some jazz structures and chromatic chords, courtesy of DiStefano.
• The song wasn't sold as a single in America but did reach #46 on Billboard's Airplay chart. The strategy of withholding singles to encourage album sales was popular in 1996, but it meant those songs couldn't chart on the Hot 100.
• The music video was shot in Tahiti, directed by John Linson and Perry Farrell. Linson later made his mark in TV, producing the shows Sons Of Anarchy and Yellowstone.