Songfacts®:

• Shawn Mullins describes "And On A Rainy Night" as a "cheating song." Unfortunately, it's about his real life.
  
  Before landing a hit with his 1998 song "Lullaby," he spent a lot of time on the road just scraping by as a touring musician facing very long odds. This isn't good for any relationship, and especially hard on a marriage.
  
  "My first wife basically ran off with someone else while I was on the road," he told Glide. "It happens. People fall in love with other people they spend time with when the other person is not there. You live and learn."
  
  Much of the time, it's the itinerant musician who does the cheating, but Mullins insists he's a one-woman man. "I've always been that way and I've loved every woman that I've been with very fully and very loyal," he said.
• This song was inspired by John Steinbeck's 1937 short story The Chrysanthemums. Mullins had been playing on Cannery Row, the street in Monterey, California, where Steinbeck wrote about in his 1945 novel Cannery Row. Mullins had been reading a lot of Steinbeck and decided to make up his own short story and turn it into a song.
  
  The lyric crafted like a Steinbeck story, with vivid images and emotional heft. In this style, Mullins sings about playing his little show on Cannery Row while his wife is back home in Georgia following her desire "like a hummingbird to cane."
• Here's a word you don't see on many lyric sheets: sinsemilla, which is a strain of marijuana. It shows up in this song here:
  
  So he fills all the holes
  With good wine from Muscle Shoals
  And the sinsemilla
  
  "I used to be a big pothead," Mullins admits.