The song dates from the Byrds' pre-fame residency at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles, as Clark explained during an interview: "There was a girlfriend I had known at the time, when we were playing at Ciro's. It was a weird time in my life because everything was changing so fast and I knew we were becoming popular. This girl was a funny girl, she was kind of a strange little girl and she started bothering me a lot. And I just wrote the song, 'I'm gonna feel a whole lot better when you're gone,' and that's all it was, but I wrote the whole song within a few minutes."