Young Turks

Many of Stewart's songs tell stories. This one is about a young couple, Billy and Patty, who are full of dreams but short on cash. Feeling stifled, they leave home and set out for a new life together. They live wild and free, but the song ends with Billy breaking the news to Patty's parents that they had a baby boy. They have a number of challenges ahead, but time is on their side.

In English vernacular, a "Young Turk" is a rebellious kind of teenager who would go against the grain. The phrase comes from insurgents in the Ottoman Empire during the late 1800s and early 1900s - 1908 marked the Young Turk Revolution. The phrase "young turks" doesn't appear in the lyrics; Stewart sings, "Young hearts be free tonight."

Stewart wrote the lyrics, but the music was composed by his drummer, Carmine Appice, and two of his keyboard players, Duane Hitchings and Kevin Savigar. Appice and Hitchings also laced the track for "D'ya Think I'm Sexy." In a Songfacts interview, Appice said: "Rod was always trying to be on the cutting edge at that time, so we did drum machine stuff. Duane had just gotten a sequencer, so we started screwing around and came up with the chords and melodies. We presented it to Rod. This one was easy because we used the whole concept that we came up with. We just transferred it from the 8-track that Duane had going right onto the 24-track. We used the drum machine and everything. Once we gave Rod the music, he wrote the lyrics." Hitchings told Songfacts: "I put together the whole song at my house with Carmine's help and used an Oberheim OBX-A, Oberheim DMA sequencer and the Oberheim DMX drum box. It was really one of the first one-man-band setups. We took the whole setup in the studio and recorded straight to tape. I started the idea because Devo was real big and one of my favorite groups, thus the fast pulsing synth groove. And of course Rod did a great job!! Got a bit of help with a nice instrumental line from Kevin Savigar also!"