Led by its hit title track, the album achieved multi-platinum status and contributed to the group winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

The original release of the album featured an impressionistic photograph on the cover of Bruce Hornsby playing an accordion.

[4] It was initially aimed at the New Age music market and included slightly different versions of the songs "Down the Road Tonight" and "The River Runs Low."

As the album's tracks began to receive regular airplay on pop music stations in late 1986, it was remixed and subsequently re-released with a new sepia-toned cover featuring a photograph of the band superimposed over an image of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel in Virginia.

The opening of "Every Little Kiss" features an extended quotation from the beginning of Movement III, The Alcotts, from Charles Ives's Piano Sonata No.