Songfacts®:

• Lyricist Will Jennings started writing this with Roy Orbison, who he became friends with when they worked with on the song "Wild Hearts Run Out Of Time" for the movie Insignificance. Jennings told us:
  "I started this song in 1985 when I was staying in Nashville finishing the writing of The Last Mango In Paris album with Jimmy Buffett. When I had time I would drive out to Orbison's house on Old Hickory Lake in Hendersonville and work on songs with him for his upcoming album. I had an apartment with a portable studio and a keyboard/rhythm machine and I came up with the chorus melody and lyric. Roy and I did not get the song finished and I put it away. Sometime after Roy died I was again in Nashville and thought Rodney would be the perfect one to finish the song with, since he came out of that working-class Texas background Roy and I came out of. Rodney and I had written several songs starting in the 1970s and I admire his writing skills. And I had taken him out to meet Roy and the 3 of us wrote a song called 'When The Blue Hour Comes,' so there was that connection. I also wrote a chorus in Spanish which I sing after the end of Rodney's album version of 'What Kind of Love.'"
• Jennings: "As far as 'What kind of love runs through your heart with a pleasure so close to pain' the answer to that question is 'Only this love that I have' emphasizing the pain and pleasure that often coexist in a passionate relationship." (Check out our interview with Will Jennings.)