Songfacts®:

• According to Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 Greatest Singles, this came to Green when he woke up before dawn the day after a show in Detroit at a motel in rural Michigan with a song forming in his mind. Half an hour later, he had it written, but his producer Willie Mitchell wasn't much interested in Green performing his own material. Said Green: "I was toting my song around in my pocket for days on end, saying, 'Hey, I got a song.' Finally, at the end of the session, I said, 'Well, I still got a song.'" It became Green's first hit.
• This song was supposed to be released on an earlier album, Green Is Blues, but didn't make the cut for technical reasons. In 1971 it made it to Al Green Gets Next to You.
• This song was Green's first breakthrough hit - his first to crack the Top 40 in America. Earlier, he'd been trying to fit into the mold of his influences, including Jackie Wilson, Wilson Pickett, James Brown, and Sam Cooke. Hi Records vice president Willie Mitchell convinced him to be true to his own voice instead, and they produced the album Green Is Blues, which was a moderate success. Al Green Gets Next to You saw the single of "Tired of Being Alone," which was to be the first of his seven consecutive gold singles.
  
  Al Green isn't just a successful R&B, soul, and gospel singer - he's also an ordained pastor in the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, Tennessee. He joined the clergy in 1976, two years after a run-in with a psychologically disturbed girlfriend, who burned him in an attack before killing herself. While many claim the incident was a wake-up call for Green to change his life, he insists his conversion occurred a year before the tragedy.
• Modern audiences might know this song better by its cover version, done in 1992 by the band Texas. Ironically, Texas is from Scotland.
• "Tired of Being Alone" appears on the soundtrack in the films Dead Presidents (1995), and Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003). It also features in the seventh episode of Netflix's Sex Education, which premiered January 11, 2019.