I Drove All Night

Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg wrote this. They have written many hit songs, including "Like A Virgin," "Eternal Flame" and "True Colors." Many of their songs start with a lyric or title Steinberg comes up with. He was living in the Coachella Valley in California and did a lot of driving back and forth between Los Angeles and the desert. He came up with the title on one of those drives.

In a Songfacts interview with Billy Steinberg, he told the story: "Tom and I were huge Roy Orbison fans. Tom grew up in Indiana and I grew up in Palm Springs, California and we really are as different as night and day as people, but the one thing that we have always shared in common is that we always liked the same music when we were kids. We both loved the Everly Brothers, Laura Nyro and Roy Orbison. We had, like most songwriters do, certain artists who inspired us and would inspire our songwriting, and one of those was Roy Orbison. When we wrote the song 'I Drove All Night,' we didn't entertain any fantasy about Roy ever recording this song. We just set out to write a song sort of in the style of Roy Orbison. In fact, what I would refer to as the B section of that song, the British would call it a pre-chorus, when it goes, 'Taste your sweet kisses your arms open wide,' that part that lifts into the chorus, it has a definite similarity to the Roy Orbison song 'Running Scared.' We had great fun writing that song because it felt like it authentically captured the spirit of the drama that Roy Orbison would inject into the great songs that he wrote, songs like 'Running Scared', 'Crying' or 'In Dreams.'"

The first person Steinberg and Kelly offered this to was Peter Kingsbery, a singer from Texas who was in the band Cock Robin. Says Steinberg, "We heard Cock Robin play live and this guy Peter Kingsbery had this great voice very much like Roy Orbison - it's a powerful voice. We thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if he would sing I Drove All Night, so we invited him over to Tom's house where we had a studio. Peter was a good guy, a little bit arrogant. He heard the song and he liked it, but he said, 'Well, I'm a songwriter myself. Why would I record one of your songs?' it was a nice meeting, but he didn't have any interest in recording our song."