Songfacts®:

• The Motels spent the late '70s making a name for themselves in the Los Angeles music scene, and their first two albums, released in 1979 and 1980, met with critical acclaim and cracked the charts in America and Australia. All Four One was their third album, and it contained their breakthrough hit "Only the Lonely," which was written by their lead singer Martha Davis. She explained the song in an interview with Beyond Race magazine. Said Davis: "'Only the Lonely' was one of those songs that was sitting on my guitar waiting for me. It literally wrote itself. It's a song about empty success. It came about while the Motels were experiencing critical acclaim, traveling the world, riding in limos, and yet I was probably as sad as I had ever been. I was in a horrible relationship and had not yet recovered from my parents' death (I doubt one ever does). The contradiction of these two worlds was where "Only the Lonely" lived... bittersweet."
• A few years prior to the release of All Four One, The Motels, short on funds, shared studio space with the Go-Go's at The Masque, a buzzing punk hangout in Los Angeles (get more on that in our interview with Charlotte Caffey of The Go-Go's). In the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, Davis tells of these days: "We used to rehearse together in the same room, under the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, in a place called the Masque, which was a famous punk rock place. They rehearsed on one side of the room, and we rehearsed on the other. We got signed first, and they said, 'We're going to move our equipment to your side of the room... maybe we'll get lucky and get signed too.' And they did."
  
  And the release of All Four One coincided with the start of MTV, which led to videos being made for "Only The Lonely" and "Take the L." All Four One went gold, powered by this Top-10 hit, and the next year The Motels appeared on Saturday Night Live.
• The video from this number garnered Martha Davis an American Music Award for "Best Performance in a Music Video."