Hand in Glove - 2011 Remaster

This song is about a lover's crippling pessimism and how it blights an otherwise ideal relationship. The Smiths' front man, Morrissey, explained to Star Hits magazine: "I just wanted to use the theme of complete loneliness. It was important to me that there'd be something searingly poetic in it, in a lyrical sense, and yet jubilant at the same time." Guitarist, Johnny Marr, told the biographer, Simon Goddard, that he assumed Morrissey wrote this song about their friendship, "purely because we were the only people hanging out with each other at the time."

Morrissey told Star Hits magazine that the couplet, "Though we may be hidden by rags, we have something they'll never have," is his favorite Smiths lyric: "It's how I felt when I couldn't afford clothes and used to dress in rags but I didn't really feel mentally impoverished."

The lyric, "I'll probably never see you again," is lifted from the Shelagh Delaney play, A Taste of Honey. Morrissey also paraphrases "Everything depends upon how near you sleep to me," from Leonard Cohen's "Take This Longing," in the lyric, "Everything depends upon how near you stand to me."