Songfacts®:

• In this song, Cobra Starship frontman Gabe Saporta plays the part of the bad boy who can seduce even the shiest of good girls. Leighton Meester, who starred in the hit series Gossip Girl at the time, guests on the track, playing the part of the girl who can't resist his charms.
• This was the breakout hit for Cobra Starship, which formed in 2006 to record the title song to the movie Snakes On A Plane (thus the band name: snakes:cobra, plane:starship). The group was all about high energy fun, with occasional social commentary baked in. They had another hit in 2011 with "You Make Me Feel..."
• Gabe Saporta wrote this song with Kevin Rudolf, Kara DioGuardi, and Jacob Kasher; Rudolf and DioGuardi produced it. Rudolf was known for his 2008 hit "Let it Rock," while DioGuardi was best known as a judge on American Idol.
  
  DioGuardi could spare a couple of hours to spend with the band in the studio, which upset Saporta. He told MTV News that he gave her a "stinky beat" and popped off a list of foul-mouthed song titles, but DioGuardi didn't flinch, which impressed the singer. Within fifteen minutes they had recorded the song.
• Saporta was a fan of both Leighton Meester and her series, Gossip Girl. He explained to MTV News how the collaboration came about: "A couple months ago, I heard a rumor that Leighton was working on a record, and I went to sleep that night dreaming of what it would be like to do a song with her. Next morning (afternoon, actually) I wake up to find out my dreams are coming true! Some people made phone calls to some other people, then, shazam! I'm on a plane to LA to record with my boo."
  
  Saporta added: "Leighton is already quite adept at portraying a princess with a nasty side - now she's just gotta sing about it. If all the world's a stage, we should all be so lucky to play Gossip Girl characters."
• Saporta told MTV News that he thought this song "would be perfect for Leighton because it's already kind of her character in Gossip Girl, like the perfect girl with the bad streak."
  
  Once Saporta sent her the song, Meester took an immediate liking to it. "I thought, 'I need to get on that!'" she said. "It totally is my sound too. Really fun to dance to it. Very edgy and cool."
• DioGuardi discussed songwriting in an article she wrote for Billboard Magazine. She said regarding the writing of "Good Girls Go Bad": "Co-writing should be a great game of tennis. You want to be in the room with people who are better than you, always, so you learn. This may lead to unlikely collaborations, which can be the best. When I worked with Cobra Starship, they were a cool indie band and I was like a cheesy pop songwriter. In the beginning, [Gabe Saporta] couldn't get his head around it. And he was almost making fun of me, and I was like, 'OK, man. Yeah, you want to bring it on? Check this out.' And we wrote 'Good Girls Go Bad.'"
• Leighton Meester appears in the Kai Regan-directed music video as an undercover cop who helps expose an illegal underground club beneath a deli. Part of the clip was shot at a real deli in the Lower East Side of New York City, while the party scenes were filmed at a nearby club.
• This was the first of a string of hooky hits co-written by Jacob Kasher. His credits since then include US Top 10 singles by Meghan Trainor ("No"), Charlie Puth ("Attention") and Maroon 5 ("Sugar," "Don't Wanna Know" and "Memories").