Songfacts®:

• This mellow Great White song finds lead singer Jack Russell heartsore and inconsolable. His friends try to lift his spirits, but he wants nothing to do with it. A song might help, but he insists it be in the tradition of love gone wrong.
• Great White usually wrote their own songs, but this one was written by Jack Blades of Night Ranger along with the songwriter Gary Burr. Blades produced the Can't Get There From Here album.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Great White guitarist Mark Kendall, he told the story: "Here's the thing about Jack Blades, man. I can show him a small musical idea, and he flies around the room and grabs the guitar. He has the energy of a 12-year-old kid on drugs. I mean, it's crazy. He is so skilled. He's like the melody master, and he gets so inspired just by a raw idea. It's almost like he hears the whole song in his head. I remember we were short, we needed one song. We had the music for it, and it ended up being called 'In The Tradition.' We just had a piece of the music. He ended up finishing it. He wrote the whole song with some Nashville dude on the phone in like 10 minutes."
  
  He added: "That was a great experience working with him, and I had to kind of let go. It's almost like getting out of your environment, going to this other environment, and having to let go of the way you do things normally a little bit. But I was very accepting with that. I really respected his career and the things he did as a songwriter. He was a staff writer for Sony. He's written for Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe, and more than people out there probably know."