Bad Day

Album: Asleep in the Bread Aisle (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • Ever have one of those days where everything just seems to go wrong? Asher Roth can sympathize. He wrote this song one day while having a conversation with himself and trying to decide what to write about. It's mostly a literal portrayal, but some parts are fictional. "It's just kind of everyday stuff," he told us. "I just wanted to write a narrative. And I think that's something that I like to do. And it was just a true story. I had come back to Atlanta, I think I was in Los Angeles, and there's a couple of made-up parts, I mean, I wasn't going to a wedding. But for the most part that was just a narrative of my day. And I got into the studio, and it was one of those things like, 'What are we gonna talk about today, brain?' And it's like, 'Oh, the same thing we talk about every day.' (laughs) But yeah, we were just like, yeah, let's just write about what happened today."

    Rapper Jazze Pha had been recording downstairs in the same studio that day, and went upstairs to check things out. He wound up loving the humor of the project and jumped in with some vocals. "I had done them in this monotone, and he added this whole kind of high octave and this character," says Asher. "The whole record came together in 45 minutes. It's pretty great when songs come together like that."
  • Roth is happy that people find the lightness in this song. "It's just the humor of the everyday," he says. "You come home from a long day of work, right? Everything like that. And you just want to vent, 'Listen to how much today sucked.' But then at the end of the record you're just like, 'Well, I'm still healthy, so it's really not that bad.' My dad always says, 'If that's the worst thing that happens in your life, you made out pretty well.' And that's really got me through a lot of little stuff, whether it's just running into a screen door - which happened yesterday (laughs), anything like that. But it's a great quote, to not sweat the small stuff." (Read more in our interview with Asher Roth.)

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