Songfacts®:

• This song became a chart-crossing hit - peaking at #4 on the Country chart, #57 on the Hot 100 and #11 on US Adult Contemporary - when Mary Chapin Carpenter covered it for her Come On Come On album in 1992, four years after its initial release on Lucinda Williams' eponymous album. Carpenter's version earned Grammy Awards for Best Country Song - also giving Williams her first Grammy as a songwriter - and Best Country Female Vocal Performance.
• After the delayed success of this song brought welcome attention to Lucinda, she packed up for Nashville and bought a house and a car. While the move didn't bring her everything she thought it would, it did inspire her work. Her experience "living in Nashville for years and having religion stuffed down my throat every day" inspired "Atonement" from her 2003 album World Without Tears.
• Lucinda wrote this song when she moved to Los Angeles with her boyfriend, Clyde Woodward, in 1984. In what she calls a "burst of creativity," she also penned "The Night's Too Long" and most of the songs for her Rough Trade album within that first year. Clyde moved back to Texas after their breakup a few years later and died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1991. Lucinda remembered him in her song "Lake Charles."
• "It almost brought me to tears one night when we were doing that song in - I think it was Charleston, South Carolina," Williams recalled in an A.V. Club interview. "Mary Chapin Carpenter had a place there, and she came to the show, and I knew she was in the audience. I said, 'This is a song that my friend Mary Chapin Carpenter recorded on her album, and it opened a big door for me because it led to me winning a Grammy for Country Song Of The Year, which neither I nor anyone else thought was a remote possibility.'"
  
  It's still a special song for Williams, and never fails to put her in a sentimental mood. She added: "I always get a little choked up when I talk about it, because I was so young and more naïve then, and Mary was already a star, really. It was my first Grammy, and it just really started everything for me. [Laughs.] When I get to the line 'It's my right,' all the women in the audience yell out and go nuts. I love it."