Songfacts®:

• This slice of power pop is the biggest hit for The Plimsouls, a Los Angeles band fronted by Peter Case, formerly of The Nerves ("Hanging On The Telephone"). The song finds Case in a state of reverie, thinking about his ex. He can't shake himself out of it, so he just sinks into it, returning to their old haunts. Nothing is going to bring him back today.
  
  "I was remembering something from a long time back and the feeling was pouring into the song," Case explained on his website. "I'd been having an affair with a girl I really thought a lot of, and that had just broken off. Something of my childhood was in it too."
• According to Case, folk music was an influence on this song. In a Songfacts interview, he explained: "When The Nerves broke up, I wanted to start a band that took the kind of songwriting desire we had and make it a band that could just blow the roof off a place. So that's what we did with The Plimsouls, and it became much more rock and roll. I put influences of soul music and folk rock on 'A Million Miles Away,' but then when I started writing these other songs I went back to my roots. I came from a place of performing solo on the street as a singer and playing in coffee houses and nightclubs as a solo player before The Nerves, so I was going full circle with that. Folk music is a part of my background."
• The Plimsouls formed in 1979 and were touring nationally by 1981. That year, they recorded "A Million Miles Away," and in 1982 they released it as a single independently on their Shaky City label. It got some airplay on college radio, which attracted the attention of Geffen Records. Geffen signed the band and issued the song as a single in 1983. That year, it was also included on their second album, Everywhere At Once.
• This song appears in a memorable scene from the 1983 movie Valley Girl where Randy (Nicolas Cage) makes a connection with Julie (Deborah Foreman), the Valley Girl, as The Plimsouls play the song in a rowdy club.
• Peter Case wrote this song with Chris Fradkin and Joey Alkes, a songwriting team whose credits include "Talk to Me" by Phil Seymour and "All Over the World" by Paul Collins' Beat. They also worked on other Plimsouls songs, including "Hush, Hush" and "Now." They came up with the song one afternoon, starting it at a restaurant and finishing it at Alkes' house. Alkes came up with the title, and Case added the next chorus line: "and there's nothing left to bring me back today." From there the rest of the song came together quickly.
• The Plimsouls broke up in 1985 but got back together in 1994 to record a new version of "A Million Miles Away" for the movie Speed, starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It plays in the bar scene.
  
  The band started playing some shows with Clem Burke of Blondie on drums, and they released an album called Kool Trash in 1997.