Songfacts®:

• "No Myth" tells the story of a breakup. It's a familiar story: the girl wants to move on but hopes they can part on good terms, just friends. For the guy, it unleashes a tsunami of emotions that have nothing to do with friendship.
  
  According to Michael Penn, the song was inspired by real breakup that left him devastated. The song was his attempt to process and make sense of the end of that relationship. Like many songwriters, Penn will often write to work out his issues in a therapeutic way.
• In the chorus, Penn evokes two leading men from classic literature: Romeo from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:
  
  What if I were Romeo in black jeans
  What if I was Heathcliff, it's no myth
  
  Then he drops a very memorable line:
  
  Maybe she's just looking for
  Someone to dance with
  
  Penn says in that line, he was using "dance" as a metaphor for sex, wondering if the girl is just looking for a casual fling and doesn't want to be tied down.
• Penn considered making the "Someone to dance with" line a lot more explicit, but shrouding it in metaphor was a lot better for airplay. He says that has led listeners to misinterpret the song, though. "I think the song's a lot more cynical than most people got from it, which is perhaps my fault in not being more specific," he told the Los Angeles Times.
• Penn used a drum machine on this song, which creates an intriguing contrast with his acoustic guitar, which is the lead instrument. The organ-like sounds were made with a Chamberlin, which is a keyboard instrument that plays tape loops, kind of like a Mellotron. It was played by Patrick Warren, who was in a band with Penn called Doll Congress back in the '80s.
• "No Myth" was Michael Penn's first single, and his biggest hit. He was one of many musicians trying to make it in Los Angeles. His band Doll Congress released an EP and opened for REM, but that's as far as they got. Penn took a real job as a "service-relations executive," but kept working on his music. He made a 4-track demo tape that included "No Myth," which earned him a record deal with RCA. The song was released in November 1989 and peaked at #13 in March 1990. Penn followed it up "This & That," which went to #53 but was his last showing on the chart.
• The music video, directed by Mark Lindquist, shows Penn and Patrick Warren performing the song in an apartment while various dramas play out in other units. The video earned Penn the Best New Artist In A Video award at the 1990 VMAs, defeating Lenny Kravitz ("Let Love Rule") and The Black Crowes ("Jealous Again").
• Michael Penn has some high-profile connections. His younger brother is the actor Sean Penn, and his even younger brother is the actor Chris Penn. Sean Penn was really famous when "No Myth" was released in 1989: He was coming off a divorce with Madonna and starred in two movies that year: Casualties of War and We're No Angels.
  
  In 1997, he married another highly respected singer-songwriter: Aimee Mann.
• We'd like to explain these lines:
  
  And if I dig a hole to China
  I'll catch the first junk to Soho
  
  This is all part of Penn looking to get away from it all so he can put the breakup behind him. A junk is a kind of Chinese boat.