People sometimes ask Moses "Mose" Tuala, "What were you thinking?!"

His answer: "I don't think I was."

Tuala's recording of the song "Your Love" started out as a joke, written by local music producer Chris Jay. The chorus goes, "Your love is like good toilet paper" and the comparisons, wacky though favorable, go on from there. But when Tuala sang it with his smooth, romantic voice, the producers liked it and put it on the 2006 island-rhythm flavored compilation album "Necessary Rukkus."

The album wasn't a big hit, but the single found an audience on Kaua'i where the reference to hurricane preparedness and the reliability of true love struck a chord:

Woke up this morning

When it's storming outside I can't get enough

Kaua'i's Island Radio 98.9 got a lot of requests for the song when it debuted in 2006. It is still on the radio and has become a kind of Kaua'i cult classic.

But for Tuala, a '98 Farrington grad who grew up singing in church, it was just a fluke thing, a song he recorded a while back with lyrics he can't completely remember.

"People in Hawai'i have a good sense of humor," he says.

The song includes a reggae-rap that takes the whole thing over the top:

Your lovin' is so fresh and so clean and so strong

And like a roll of Charmin, girl, your lovin' last long

Your love is so good and you, girl, are so pretty

With your love behind me, girl, I never feel shhh. ...

Tuala performed on Kaua'i only once, and not as a soloist but as a backup singer for Pati. He has good memories of that trip; the audience was friendly and he tried deer meat for the first time.

But for now, he's put his music aside and is concentrating on a steady job in the warehouse at Armstrong Produce to help his family come home from California.

Has he ever sung the toilet paper song to a woman? Tuala cracks up at the question. "Oh, no, no, no," he says. "It was just something funny around the guys."

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172.