Songfacts®:

• "Enter Maurice" is an homage to 1950s doo-wop music, notable for the line "the pompitous of love" a year before Steve Miller used it in his hit "The Joker." In doo-wop tradition, Miller speaks the verses, including these lyrics:
  
  I can whisper sweet words of epismetology in your ear
  And speak to you of the pompitous of love
  
  Decades later, we learned that these lines came from a 1954 song called "The Letter" by the doo-wop group The Medallions, written by their lead singer, Vernon Green. In 1995, Jon Cryer starred in a movie called The Pompatus Of Love. When he was doing promotion for the film, Green took notice and they had a conversation where Green explained that in "The Letter," "epismetology" was really "pizmotality" and "pompitous" was really "puppetutes." He defined them thus:
  
  Pizmotality: Words of such secrecy they could only be spoken to the one you loved.
  
  Pompatus: A secret paper-doll fantasy figure who would be my everything and bear my children.
  
  Cryer explains all this in his memoir So That Happened.
• In this song, Steve Miller plays the character Maurice, who starts off romantic, letting the girl know that he's the right guy for her. But then it takes a very dark turn. After a fake ending where the song fades out, Miller comes back with another verse where Maurice has a gun and warns her not to leave him.
• Steve Miller Band's 1973 album The Joker was a breakthrough, and they became one of the more popular artists of the '70s thanks to hits like "Fly Like An Eagle" and "Rock 'N Me." But the band released seven albums - mostly blues - before The Joker, starting in 1968. "Enter Maurice" is on their seventh album, Recall The Beginning... A Journey From Eden.