Nice Guys Finish Last

Album: Hot Mess (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the opening track from American pop-punk band Cobra Starship's third album, Hot Mess.
  • In January 2009 the band rented a cabin in rural Pennsylvania to flesh out the songs without distractions. This was one of the fruits from those sessions.
  • Frontman Gabe Saporta told MTV News the story of this song: "I used to have this boss, I had one job when I was a kid, after high school, I was working for this guy who had a company that cleaned garbage chutes in buildings. And I don't know how he ended up doing that, because he was a rock-and-roll dude. He had Rod Stewart hair, and he was, like, 50. It was awesome. But he was such a chauvinist pig, and I was a straight-edge punk kid, very politically correct. Like, I would take offense if someone said something rude, which is the exact opposite of the way I am now. But I was that kid. And one time, he was like, 'Yeah, you treat girls like sh--, they'll stick to you like toilet paper.'

    And I was like, 'What?!?! That's f---ed up!' But I put that into the song, that he told me that. I mean, I don't treat girls like sh--, but the song's about that. Sometimes the bad boys end up getting the girls. We know a couple of guys who are 'too nice.' Like our sound guy, he'll just meet some girl and, like, give her flowers."

    Saporta added: "We wear our influences proudly. We don't take influences from one genre. We have Adam Ant influences in that song, like 'Goody Two Shoes'; there's a Britney influence in that song; there's a big-band, Brian Setzer influence in the song. It's like this big soup we put together, stir it up and puke out some Cobra s--t. A bunch of babes sing on it. One is the girl on the cover of the record. [Cobra keytarist] Victoria [Asher] sings on it. Cassadee Pope from Hey Monday, we added her to it on tour. Our engineer's girlfriend sings on there. A bunch of other friends of his too."
  • The woman on the album cover who also sings on this track is Bim Fernandez, a friend of the band.

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