Songfacts®:

• This is a track from Lonely Avenue, a collaboration album by English novelist Nick Hornby and American singer-songwriter Ben Folds. Hornby often writes about music, musicians, and music lovers in his fiction and non-fiction work. His novels include High Fidelity and About a Boy.
• This song is a tribute to the work of Doc Pomus, lyricist of countless '50s and '60s pop hits including The Drifters' "Save The Last Dance For Me," Dion & the Belmonts' "A Teenager in Love" and Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas."
• The pair hatched the plan for Lonely Avenue during a dinner conversation one night in 2009. After that, Hornby began regularly emailing lyrics to Folds, who then wrote the music. Folds told Billboard magazine: "With Nick's lyrics, sometimes all it really needed was one chord and two notes and that was going to bring the lyrics out and move people the most. And if I knew in the back of my head that a great deal of my audience - that was kind of music-oriented - was going to ask 'Why did he make it so simple?' Well, I'm serving the lyrics so I had to take myself out of it."
• The album title is taken from Doc Pomus' breakthrough song "Lonely Avenue," which was a rhythm and blues hit for Ray Charles in 1956.