Songfacts®:

• With such a melodious title, you would expect it to be repeated quite often, like Madonna did, but "true blue" never shows up in the lyric to this early Rod Stewart song. There's no real chorus, but at the end of the song, Stewart returns to a theme common in his music:
  
  I gotta get home as soon as I can
• When he started releasing solo albums in 1969, Stewart was also in the band Faces, whose members often contributed to his songs. "True Blue" is essentially a Faces song; Stewart wrote it with his bandmate Ronnie Wood, who also played guitar on the track, and the other musicians are Faces members Ronnie Lane (bass), Ian McLagan (piano) and Kenney Jones (drums).
• Rod Stewart often writes in character, which explains the downtrodden guy in this song and the opening line, "Never been a millionaire." He was most certainly a millionaire by this time, having landed a #1 hit with "Maggie May," one of his songs that is based on his real life - his first intimate encounter.
• Midway through the song, Faces fire up the engines quite literally as we hear a car engine roaring. Stewart wrote of the song in his Anthology collection: "Although this appeared on one of my albums, this is the Faces at their best. It took 20 minutes to lay down the track and five hours to record the car in the street for the intro. Woody used an open-tuned guitar."