Songfacts®:

• Brother Clyde is a Los Angeles based super group comprising Country music singer Billy Ray Cyrus, one time Mötley Crüe and Eagles of Death Metal drummer Samantha Maloney, Snot guitarist Jamie Miller plus Dan Knight as the other guitarist and Dave Henning on bass. This is the first single from the band's self-titled debut album.
• Billy Ray produced the album and wrote or co-wrote most of the songs. However, this one, which sees Cyrus duetting with the New York rapper King Phaze, came from outside the group. The tune was originally penned by Morris Joseph Tancredi, a young musician who was the Country star's driver when he was in Vancouver, shooting his 2009 film, Christmas in Canaan. When Tancredi asked Cyrus what he'd been doing musically, Billy Ray played him "Crawl," the first song he wrote for Brother Clyde, which was inspired by the Mumbai bombings. He recalled to The Boot: "It saddened and angered me so much. All that blood, people crying... I just cranked up my amp and played, 'You better crawl.' It came as ugly as it sounds.
  (Tancredi) said, 'That's straight up alternative rock.' Then he said, 'I have some stuff of my own you've gotta hear.'" This tune was one of the songs that Tancredi played to Cyrus.
• Cyrus told The Boot: "'Lately'... that is a really powerful record about the sign of our times. Seeing what is going on in our world, this song is going to speak to a lot of people. The music is going to translate."
• The song's music video does not feature any of the group's members. Instead, it shows both natural disasters and human creations that are destroying the earth. "I thought it was quintessential to this video not to have any band performance... no pictures of my face," Billy Ray explained to The Boot. "It's about the world, the human race and Mother Earth. We wanted the video to stay in that realm. We were looking at everything that's happened lately - the earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Tennessee, the oil spill - there was stuff on the news every single day that reflects more and more what 'Lately' is about."