Songfacts®:

• This was one of Graham Parker's most popular songs, a put down of the kind of girls Parker found around London. Parker had a combination of anger and wanderlust that fueled the bitter song. He had recently left Mercury Records, which he felt badly mismanaged his career, and had traveled to Morocco in a Hippie phase, discovering Dylan and Van Morrison along the way. Parker told us: "It wasn't until I'd done all my Hippie traveling and being a freak and all that, and got back and lived with my parents and started to absorb all influence of my earlier years. I just pushed myself out in the world, got to London and met the right people, including Dave Robinson, who became my manager. He put the band the Rumour around me. So that was basically the beginnings of my career. I was just basically what I consider to be a successful singer/songwriter/musician by the time I came to write Squeezing Out Sparks. It was very inspired times for me, and that's what resulted in that album."
• Parker was backed by his band The Rumour for the Squeezing Out Sparks album, which was his first release distributed in the US on Arista Records. This song features some distinctive guitar work from Rumour guitarist Brinsley Schwarz, who along with Nick Lowe was part of the band Brinsley Schwarz, an act that had some success in the UK in the early to mid-'70s.
• Jack Nitzsche produced the Squeezing Out Sparks album. Nitzsche, who was known for his work with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, helped Parker with streamlining the arrangements on the album to give it a cleaner sound.