Songfacts®:

• Taylor wrote this soothing, grown-up lullaby for his then-girlfriend Joni Mitchell while they were in New Mexico for Taylor's acting debut in the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop. Taylor did not enjoy the experience of making the drag-racing drama, but the now-sober singer did have a lot of fun doing mescaline and cruising the Southwest landscape in a camper with Mitchell and co-star Warren Oates. One evening after filming wrapped up, Taylor went back to his Albuquerque hotel room and wrote the song, but he doesn't quite know where it came from.
  
  "It's a very unconscious process - writing songs, to me," Taylor told the Dutch music series Top 2000 a gogo in 2007. "They happen. I'm grateful when they do, they come through me, but I have no real direction of it. I just make songs that I want to hear, I make music that I want to hear. In many ways I feel as though I have the same experience of the songs that my audience does, it's just that I hear them first."
• In the lyrics, the narrator is preparing to spend one more day with his lover before he leaves (for reasons unknown to the listener). But when he's gone, she'll always have this song to comfort her. Taylor did end up saying goodbye to Mitchell - at least, romantically. A year after this was released, he married Carly Simon. In 1977, Taylor and Simon recorded the song as a duet at their home in Martha's Vineyard.
• A few months before this featured on Taylor's Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, his sister Kate Taylor sang it on her debut, Sister Kate. Peter Asher produced both albums. He also reinvented the song as a stringed country ballad for Linda Ronstadt for her 1974 album, Heart Like A Wheel. In a 2018 Songfacts interview, Asher explained how he approached having Ronstadt cover already-established songs: "The arrangement is a framework for how the artist does it. So, it's all based on Linda singing the song, so we would always sit with the guitar or piano or something and try out the song. And then I'd start thinking and bounce the ideas off Linda, who has brilliant ideas herself of how to do it."
• Several other artists have covered this, including Richie Havens, Maureen McGovern, Sting, Sheryl Crow, and Eddie Vedder (with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks). Carly Simon also recorded it - accompanied by her children with Taylor, musicians Sally Taylor and Ben Taylor - for her 2007 album, Into White.
• Taylor on his confessional songwriting style and how it relates to rap music: "Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable and a little embarrassed that I'm so self-absorbed and so self-observed but that's the kind of song I write so they are very confessional or personal. Actually I noticed a lot of rap music is… about people proclaiming themselves. You know, in a sense, 'Here I am, this is me, this is what I'm like. This is what it's like for me.' I realized that a steady diet of that is probably a little too much but every once in a while it's okay."
• This was used on The Wonder Years in the 1989 episode "Math Class."