Songfacts®:

• Not the famous Johnny Cash tune, this is an original Brian Wilson composition. The Beach Boys founder wrote the song with The Dream Academy's Nick Laird-Clowes of "Life In A Northern Town" fame.
• Brian Wilson explained the background to the song: "The lyrics are all about me, how I'm always walking over thin ice, could fall through at any minute. I tread lightly on everything I do, walk the line so to speak. Not all the time, but it is one of my sub-theme songs of my whole life.
  
  When I wrote that, I was at the piano, and I was remembering an old bass line that I had written, a left hand. And I said to myself, 'I want to record a song that has bass sounds like a '60s record but has an '80s feeling to it, an '80s vibration.' So I took that old bass line that I had never finished and incorporated it into a new kind of sound.
  
  It was all in remembering the feeling, the spirit I had when I wrote the bass line a long time ago. I always felt good about that left hand, a good vibration about it."