Perfect World

Alex Call wrote this song. He was lead singer of the band Clover, which Huey Lewis joined as a harmonica player. They released four albums and served as Elvis Costello's band on his first album, My Aim Is True. Despite the best efforts of Mutt Lange, who produced their last two albums, and Nick Lowe, who mentored the group, they never had a hit single and broke up in 1978. Lewis and Call remained friends.

In the early '80s, Alex Call wrote "Jenny (867-5309)" for Tommy Tutone and "Little Too Late" for Pat Benatar. He told Songfacts how he came up with "Perfect World": "It was 1985 when I wrote that song. I had a band that was like Huey Lewis & the News by then. I had a 9-piece band, I had three horns, a couple girl singers, me and the band. People told me it was a ska sort of feel, but I was just goofing around, just trying to come up with stuff. The lyric is very unconscious, I just scatted it out and used it. Later on, I looked at it and tried to figure out what it meant. It's the thing about The Quest, what are we really looking for in life? We know that life isn't perfect, but we keep on looking for it anyway because there's something inside us maybe that is perfect. That's what it's really about for me. The inner being is pretty simple and straightforward, and the outer being is quite neurotic and screwed up, and I think that's what the song is really about. It's a hopeful song."

In his Songfacts interview, Alex Call said: "I love the song because the horn lines that I wrote, Tower of Power had to play my horn lines, which I thought was better than having a hit single. They did a whole horn arrangement. I remember when they were cutting the song and Huey said they were coming in with all these horn parts and one by one they eliminated them and kept pretty much all my horn parts. There's some little stuff in there that's definitely not me that they did, but I was very proud of that song and I loved the recording they did of it, I think it's fantastic. Johnny Colla, Huey's guitar player/horn player, his vocal arrangements are just fantastic on that thing."