Songfacts®:

• The flower merchants who you sometimes catch at stoplights inspired this song. Nick Lowe told KLRU: "I pulled up at a stoplight, a gentleman approached my car and shoved a bunch of flowers towards me. I was struck by the thought that if you bought some flowers from one of these guys and gave them to someone and said, 'Look, I'm really sorry,' it would make it much worse, it would be a sort of insult."
• Lowe told KLRU that although the song came to him very easily, the title did not: "The hardest part was thinking about what to call it. In the UK we call them 'traffic lights,' but that doesn't exactly spring off the tongue. But then I thought, 'Ah, in the States they call them 'spotlights.'"
• The Old Magic was Lowe's thirteenth solo album. Lowe told The Huffington Post that the album was the result of an "ongoing work": "Well, I tend not to record albums as a 'piece' because I'm not really that prolific. I'll wait until I've got three or four tunes, and then I'll round everybody up and we'll go record them. Then, quite a long time might go by before I've got three or four more that I think can turn out okay. So, it's not really a project, each record. It's more of an ongoing work. Yeah, that's really how it works."