Songfacts®:

• How's this for a metaphor for unfaithfulness: When you pull back the covers in your girl's bed, you see the sheets are dirty because another guy has been sleeping there. Or as Descendents lead singer Milo Aukerman sings, "Those sheets are dirty and so are you."
• "Clean Sheets" was written by Bill Stevenson, the drummer for the Descendents who was also their producer. According to Milo Aukerman, it's about a real person.
  
  "That was a girl that he was dating and she cheated on him," he told Thrasher Magazine. "So that was his song documenting the fact that she was cheating on him."
• The song is part of the 1987 Descendents album All, the last one they released before their hiatus later that year. The band's frontman, Milo Aukerman, has a parallel life as a biochemist. The group's 1982 debut album is called Milo Goes to College because he was indeed leaving for college (University of California, San Diego). When the band took a break in 1987, Milo worked in the field while his bandmates formed a new group called All, named after the album. Descendents returned to action in 1995 and released their next album, Everything Sucks, in 1996.
• Aukerman says "Clean Sheets" is "the first truly slick pop song that we tried to do." It's a sound that influenced later group's like Good Charlotte and blink-182.
• Fittingly, this "Clean Sheets" came to Bill Stevenson when he was in bed. He says he woke up one morning with the song fully formed in his head.