Songfacts®:

• Billy Squier landed a hit in 1981 with "My Kinda Lover," a swagger-filled rocker with a chorus you're not likely to forget - it's just the phrase "My kinda lover" repeated over and over. The song is from his breakthrough album Don't Say No, which also includes the hits "The Stroke" and "In the Dark." Squier wrote all these songs himself and also handled all the guitar work.
• Squier channeled the UK superstar Tom Jones, known for '60s hits like "It's Not Unusual" and "What's New Pussycat?" on this song. Jones sang in a kind of over-the-top manner, as if he knew the ladies were powerless against his charms. Squier imbued the song with that kind of confidence, particularly on the opening line, "You got me runnin' baby," where he stretches out the word "baby."
  
  "I wasn't trying to do it as a Tom Jones song, but I just remember thinking, 'Man, this would be great,'" he told Mark Zander. "That was a strangely Tom Jones influenced track, which you would obviously never hear!"
• The Don't Say No album was released just a few months before MTV went on the air. After they launched, Squier shot simple performance videos for "My Kinda Lover," "The Stroke" and "In The Dark" all in one day. The videos were simple but effective. MTV played them a lot, in part because they didn't have many American artists to choose from (Squier is from Massachusetts). Exposure on the network gave him a huge bump that helped the album sell over 3 million copies.
• "My Kinda Lover" has a famous B-side: Billy Squier's holiday favorite "Christmas Is The Time To Say "I Love You"." The single was released in November 1981 and soon after, Squier shot a video for his Christmas song at the MTV studios that they used as a video Christmas card to viewers. Radio stations also put the song in rotation, and eventually it was released as an A-side single. Later in the decade, many rockers put out Christmas songs (culminating in the 1987 compilation A Very Special Christmas), but Squier led the way.