Songfacts®:

• "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts," Mark Twain wrote. "Roam" is the musical equivalent of that quote; a call to go out and see the world.
  
  Released as the follow-up single to "Love Shack," it also climbed to #3 in the US, giving the B-52s two huge hits from the Cosmic Thing album.
• The group's female singers, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson, handle the vocals on this track, with Pierson taking the first verse and Wilson the second. On the chorus, bridge and third verse, they sing together. It's one of the few B-52s songs where Fred Schneider has nothing to do; when they played it live, he would hang back with a tambourine.
• Robert Waldrop, a good friend of the band who did their Wild Planet album cover, wrote the lyric. The four band members are credited with writing the music.
• Nile Rodgers produced this track. A consistent hitmaker, he helped the B-52s break out of a creative funk and expand their audience. The group's guitarist, Ricky Wilson, died in 1985. The following year, the last album they worked on with him, Bouncing off the Satellites, was released and flopped. The group fractured, returning in 1987 to come up with new material. Their first release was the song "Cosmic Thing," which Rodgers produced for the 1988 movie Earth Girls Are Easy. When they made the album, they had to start without Rodgers, who was wrapping up another project. This ended up giving the album even more creative energy, as they spent a month recording four songs with Don Was, including "Love Shack."
• Like the "Love Shack" video, "Roam" was directed by Adam Bernstein. It also did very well on MTV, thanks to the photogenic leading ladies and curious compositing, showing the band in various exotic locales.