“Only the Lonely” by The Motels

"Only the Lonely" was the first single from the Motels' third album, All Four One, sent out by Capitol in April 1982, and it's the lone survivor of a darker record that never was. The band had cut a set of gloomier songs for the album, then shelved them all except this one, which they reworked; the rest stayed in the vault until Apocalypso in 2011.

Martha Davis wrote it by herself, on a guitar handed down from her late father, a University of California, Berkeley administrator who had come across it in Stiles Hall. By her own account it's about empty success, and she sings it that way: cool, smoky and a little hollow-eyed over Val Garay's glossy new wave production. A popular video helped carry it into the Billboard top ten that summer.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.