Songfacts®:

• In "Dance On My Own," Robert Plant sings about how he's so happy about the girl on his block that he can't stop dancing. If that summary sounds comically absurd, rest assured that it's the least comically absurd one we could come up with. That simply is what the song is about.
  
  Plant also happened to be 40 years old when he was singing about being so happy about the girl on his block that he was "happy dancin'" by himself. That, too, is the least comically absurd option we could come up with.
• Plant had big ambitions with Now and Zen, his fourth solo studio album. He wanted to contribute to the popular music scene of the time by showing that electronic music could retain the passion and humanity of traditional music like blues and rock. While electronic instrumentation had already been around for a while, the critics and large segments of the public found it to be artificial and soulless.
  
  Plant's ambitions paid off, and Now and Zen became his most impactful solo album. It produced five charting singles and climbed to #6 in the US and #10 in the UK.
  
  Years later, Plant would tell at least one magazine (Uncut), that in hindsight he felt much of the album suffered from being so influenced by the idiosyncrasies of its era. At the time, though, Now And Zen made Plant a major player for the first time since his run with Led Zeppelin.
• This was the third of five singles released off of Now and Zen and reached #10 on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart. It's probably the most '80s-sounding song on the album.
• Producer/keyboardist Phil Johnstone and programmer Robert Crash co-wrote the song with Plant. Johnstone co-wrote all the songs on the album except for "Why."