Misunderstanding

This was one of the first songs Phil Collins wrote on his own. He was going through a very difficult time - his first wife Andrea had left him and taken their two children with her. Phil found himself alone in the house he once shared with them, and began writing songs - sad ones. "Misunderstanding" finds Collins getting stood up and failing to understand that the girl wants nothing to do with him. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he keeps blaming her evasiveness on "some misunderstanding." In a way, Collins is looking at himself as a witness observer - his story about a man who is delusional in love reflects his hopeless attempts to put his marriage back together (they divorced in 1980). At the time, Collins had much deeper concerns than being left out in the rain, and those concerns are laid bare on the song "Please Don't Ask," which is one of his most personal tales. "Misunderstanding" has a lot more distance, and also a lot more hit potential. Both songs were used on the Genesis album Duke; Collins poured out more of his heart on his first solo album, Face Value, which was released the following year.

This was the second Top 40 US hit for Genesis, following "Follow You, Follow Me." The band began divesting themselves of their progressive rock roots in 1978 with the release of their album And Then There Were Three. They continued moving toward more compact pop songs with "Misunderstanding," which runs just 3:08.

To write songs for the Duke album, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks moved into Collins' house in Surrey, England for six weeks. Collins hadn't done much writing at that point, but Rutherford and Banks were very impressed when he played them this song. Five of the other songs for the album were group efforts written during these sessions when the band would jam together. Banks recalled to Cleveland's 98.5 WNCX: "'Misunderstanding' was the first song we recorded that Phil wrote. Phil didn't used to write all that much of Genesis' material in the early days, up to and including Duke, really. He just didn't rate himself as a writer that much, I don't think, and he'd never really tried it before. But after his problems with his marriage in that year, he started to write songs. And he played us a load of the songs he'd written and we picked out of them two songs. One of them was 'Misunderstanding.'"