It's Different for Girls

"It's Different for Girls" contained lyrics that feature Jackson "deliberately turn[ing] clichés on their head" in that, while originally sounding as if the song would suggest that the male protagonist was looking for sex and his female partner was looking for love, the opposite is revealed to be the case.[3] Jackson later said on the song's lyrics:

It was something that I heard somewhere that struck me as a cliché. The sort of thing that someone might say. And again, I thought, What could that be about? And that maybe the idea was to turn it on its head and have a conversation between a man and a woman and what you'd expect to be the typical roles are reversed. So that was the idea of that.

— Joe Jackson, Songfacts, 2012[4]

Taken from the Gold-certified 1979 album I'm the Man, "It's Different for Girls" was Joe Jackson's biggest UK chart single, peaking at #5 in the UK Singles Chart and #101 in Billboard.[5] The song was backed with another track from I'm the Man, "Friday," in Britain, but in America, a live cover of the Chuck Berry song "Come On" was used instead.

The song opens with a simple repeated two-note pattern on guitar which is quickly joined by a pulse on bass and drums. The first section of the verse remains quiet, with these instruments and the singer's voice being the main components. In the second section of the verse the dynamics change, with two strident beats on the lyrics "She said", and then drop back down to a quieter chorus driven by a slow arpeggiated guitar pattern, over which the vocal floats in a more complex melody, before returning to the original two-note guitar and bass pulse of the introduction.

Unlike many of Jackson's later songs, he plays no instruments, keyboards being absent from the track.

• Joe Jackson – vocals
• Gary Sanford – guitar
• Graham Maby – bass, vocals
• David Houghton – drums, vocals

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics