Songfacts®:

• The eighth song on High Noon, "Hey Kids!" started out as a demo that frontman, Max Kerman, worked on in GarageBand. It originally sounded like a Talking Heads song but when Kerman showed it to Arkells keyboardist, Anthony Carone, he started playing along in an Elton John kind of style.
• Arkells struggled with the song and it did not have a chorus for a long time. When they would practice at their rehearsal space, the band's drummer, Tim Oxford, would record them and give the songs fake names when they did not have titles yet. Oxford named the song "Hey Kids!" because the beginning of it sounds like Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" but faster, and the first lyric in "Bennie And The Jets" is "Hey kids."
• There are two themes in the tune that are complete opposites. Max Kerman explained to the Huffington Post Canada the various meanings: "The first: every person is precious and unique. Second: given the first statement, get over yourself."
  
  He continued, "There is a shared experience in living and overcoming struggle that every person must recognize in each other. Let’s foster that with tales of inclusion, not division."