Songfacts®:

• By the time she released her second album, Mindy Smith had already lived in Nashville for nearly a decade, but she was still a Long Island girl at heart, which inspired the title track of Long Island Shores.
  
  "I think songs about home are always gonna strike a chord," Smith told Songfacts in a 2022 interview. "Long Island Shores" is just being proud to be from New York and thankful for my life there, even though I had to leave it. There are still connections there but the memories and the childhood, even as challenging as it was, there's still a lot of gratitude and pride to have been raised in Long Island, New York. I'm not just talking about pizza and bagels. I'm talking about the community I grew up in with my small church. And that my dad and my mom made a life for us there. It's important for me to sing about and share about that with my siblings."
• Despite her appreciation for her hometown, Smith faced some hurdles during her upbringing, especially from unsupportive educators. "My music teachers were not kind to me at all," she admitted. "It was very difficult to want to keep doing music. It was such a big deal to me. It was as big a deal as a young athlete wants to play a sport and their coach doesn't give them an opportunity for any reason or they're just shot down. It makes it hard. It's the same thing for me in music. It was just in me. I would say that prepared me for being in an industry that isn't very kind to people. I had that under my belt. It's those things that shaped me. Just even being able to see the big wins, even though to other people they're not that big of a deal."
• Smith is one of many musicians who hail from Long Island. Others include Billy Joel, Mariah Carey, Pat Benatar, Lou Reed, LL Cool J, Ashanti, and Laura Branigan, as well as the groups Public Enemy, Taking Back Sunday, Vanilla Fudge, and Blue Oyster Cult.
• Smith sings about returning home to visit her mother's burial site ("In the earth of the Long Island shores,
  I will visit her grave"). She died of breast cancer in 1991, and Smith has written many songs about dealing with the loss, including "One Moment More" and "Everything Here Will Be Fine."