Songfacts®:

• Group members Jeff Carlisi and Don Barnes wrote this song with Jim Peterik, who was a member of the band Survivor. .38 Special's first hit was "Hold On Loosely," which Peterik wrote for Survivor - the bands were on the same label, and when the song didn't make Survivor's album, it went to .38 Special. This led to a collaboration between Carlisi, Barnes and Peterik, who wrote most of the hits for .38 Special.
• Jim Peterik told us: "There was a lot of resentment that I was writing songs not only for Survivor, but I was writing them with .38 Special too. I'm talking about resentment from my own band, Survivor. What I tried to explain to them, which fell on deaf ears, was that the .38 songs would never have been right for Survivor. They came from another place in me and were very much a product of the synergy of Don Barnes, Jim Peterik and Jeff Carlisi. All they could see was competition on the charts from someone who wrote the songs for both bands. When .38 Special came in to write for the next record, I was kind of sneaking around. Survivor didn't even know .38 Special was in town. We had to find places to write songs. We couldn't go to the band house, and at my house, what if one of the guys stopped over? So we went to my mother's house and wrote in the basement. We were writing 'Caught Up In You' in this gloomy room in my mother's basement all dark and dank, and we're writing this hit song. I was feeling like the bad kid playing hooky or something." (Jim is author of the book Songwriting For Dummies.)
• Frankie Sullivan of Survivor is also a credited writer on this song, which is a source of contention between him and Jim Peterik. According to Peterik, Sullivan demanded the credit because he thought it used a chord progression for a song they were writing with Survivor called "Take it All." In his autobiography, Peterik wrote: "Even though there was no solid evidence to the similarity, I got 38 to agree to cut him in to the copyright just to avoid a lawsuit."