Songfacts®:

• "Everywhere That I'm Not" is one of those songs that was never a hit but is still pretty famous. It's the first single and most popular song by the band Translator, which formed in Los Angeles but moved to San Francisco in the early '80s, where they signed to Columbia Records and joined a vibrant music scene that included Journey, Huey Lewis and the News and Boz Scaggs. Along with Romeo Void and The Mutants, they were up-and-comers on the scene, but instead of relying on synthesizers, they were guitar-driven.
  
  Translator built a fervent following and were favorites of record store clerks and college radio DJs, but they never crossed over to the mainstream. They split up in 1986, going out with a farewell concert at The Farm, a cultural hub in San Francisco. They staged a reunion in 2006 and released another album in 2017.
• The song was written by Translator guitarist Steve Barton, who sings lead on the track. It describes a familiar feeling for anyone who has gone through a tough breakup, as Barton thinks he sees his ex but then realizes it's not her - she couldn't possibly be there. Where is she? He doesn't know but it's somewhere he's not.
  
  "I was living in a really cool old house in Echo Park in Los Angeles," Barton told Songfacts. "The relationship I was in was exploding apart."
• Steve Barton wrote the song in 1979 when Translator was still a trio, with Larry Dekker on bass and Dave Scheff on drums. They soon added Robert Darlington, another singer-guitarist, to the lineup.
  
  Darlington told Songfacts: "I started out as a fan of Translator, when they were the best trio on earth. Steve's songs were unique, and the band played with more energy than any other three bands playing together. From the first time I heard it, 'Everywhere That I'm Not' was an obvious hit to me. After I joined the band, it was even more fun to play it."
• If you're getting an Iggy Pop vibe from this song, that's because Steve Barton was "obsessed" with the Lust For Life album at the time.
  
  "'The Passenger' has a similar swingy type of damaged swagger," he told Songfacts. "A friend of mine reminded me recently that he and I had played my 45 of 'Live' by The Merry-Go-Round the day before I wrote the song. That song also has a strummy jangle. Maybe those two records got into my mind. I also had the Ted Greene Chord Chemistry book, which lots of guitar players had back then. It would have five pages of different voicings to play an Emin chord, for example. I took what that book had to offer and shook up the way I played the chords. Strange inversions and shapes. Unique.
  
  For the chorus, I chose to go to typical Amin, G, D guitar chords for contrast. When Larry Dekker came up with the walking bass part, we all smiled and said yes.
  
  I also remember that once I had the 'I thought I saw you...', 'I thought I heard your voice...' beginnings of the verses, I found that starting with the different senses really worked lyrically. I wrote the song in about half an hour in one sitting."
• David Kahne produced this song and the rest of Translator's debut album, Heartbeats and Triggers. Kahne worked for the group's label, 415 Records, at the time; he went on to do production work for a long list of notables, including The Bangles, Sublime, Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney.
  
  Kahne, though, didn't need to do much work on "Everywhere That I'm Not"; the demo the band made was so good they used it as the finished product.
• MTV launched a year earlier, so Translator made music videos for some of their songs, starting with this one. "It was really fun to do," Steve Barton says. "We rented a club in San Francisco and invited all our friends for the performance section. Looking at it today, it has such a great low budget feel. Really cool."