Songfacts®:

• O-Town was never in the same league with Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync, but their self-titled, debut album still sold over a million copies in the US. The group was assembled from a reality show called Making the Band, and knowing that they would get a big promotional push, the top songwriters in the game submitted songs.
  
  Two of the songwriters who composed this one are names you would expect: Gregg Sutton and Desmond Child - both veteran pop song composers. The other writer is surprising: Jesse James Dupree of the savage rock band Jackyl. The song was written when the composers were at a songwriting retreat in France where attendees were randomly paired up to write together. When Child and Dupree ended up in the same room, Child wanted to write a Jackyl song, but Dupree wanted to get out of his comfort zone and do something different.
  
  The result was "Love Should Be a Crime," a typical adolescent burner about a girl who plays so many mind games, that her love could be a misdemeanor.
• Desmond Child submitted this song to O-Town. His co-writer Jesse James Dupree had no idea, and initially writing it. When told the record had sold 130,000 copies it's first week, Dupree's memory became much more clear. "I said, 'Oh, yeah, that's me.'"