Songfacts®:

• When this song was released, Sophie B. Hawkins told Q it was about "love and death, someone close to me who died earlier this year."
  
  The line, "I miss you making love to me right" is a good clue as to what kind of relationship she had with this person, but as we found out when we asker about the inspiration for her first hit, "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover," Hawkins sees these songs as existing on another plane. "The love affair's still going on," she told Q. "It feels like there's no distance between us. I just talk to myself and they're there. Love and death, they're the big things that scare you though, aren't they?"
• Hawkins wrote this with the songwriter/producers Stewart Lerman and Rick Chertoff. It was produced by Steve Lipson.
• This was the first single from Hawkins' second album, Whaler. When it stalled at #56, it seemed like the album had been harpooned. The second single, "Don't Don't Tell Me No," didn't make the chart, but then the third one, a slow-moving lullaby-like song called "As I Lay Me Down," found an audience and rose to #6 a year after the album was released.
• Hawkins spent much of her childhood in the old whaling town of Sag Harbor, Long Island, which is where the album title came from. She said it "reminds me of the omnipotence of nature, but it also reminds me of the fact that people think they're somehow getting in control of nature."