Leaving Las Vegas

This came out of the "Tuesday Night Music Club," a gathering of Los Angeles musicians who got together on Tuesday nights to write songs. Crow named the album after the club and gave the members songwriting credits on this and six other songs on the album. Credited on this track are: Bill Bottrell (also the album's producer), David Baerwald, Kevin Gilbert and David Ricketts.

The title came from a 1990 novel written by John O'Brien, a friend of Tuesday Night Music Club member David Baerwald. The book is about an alcoholic who essentially drinks himself to death in Las Vegas. O'Brien himself was an alcoholic, and by the time this song came out on the album, he was in the throes of addiction. The novel was just a modest success, but in 1992 a producer named Stuart Regan discovered the book and began the process of making it into a movie, which ended up being the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas starring Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. On April 10, 1994, O'Brien killed himself. This was a few months before the movie began shooting and a few weeks before the song started getting steady airplay. Interviews with O'Brien's family revealed that the writer was deeply depressed, and even the impending success of his novel could not shake him out of it.

The lyrics reflect Crow's life, but are not literal. She left a small town in Missouri to make it in Los Angeles; "Leaving Kennett" wouldn't make a great song title. Since this was Crow's first album, many fans assumed the lyrics were her life story rather than a representation.