Songfacts®:

• One of Hutchinson's earliest songs, "Rock and Roll" is about a guy and a girl who live to party, always looking forward to the weekend when they can hit the clubs. In the end, they find each other, ditch their friends, and hook up.
• The couple in this song seem to live on their own terms:
  
  If they wanna rock they rock
  If they wanna roll they roll
  
  But there's something sad about this carefree existence: it lacks meaning. "I always felt 'Rock and Roll' was a little bit misunderstood as a song," Hutchinson said in a Songfacts interview. "It's upbeat and catchy, but it's a pretty cynical view of people and partying and love."
• Hutchinson wrote this before he was old enough to get into bars. He was living in New York City over the summer, and imagining what it would be like. When he was old enough to check out the club scene for himself, he found that his description wasn't far off.
• Hutchinson first released this song on a little-heard album called That Could've Gone Better that he released independently in 2003. The song got the attention of Madonna's imprint Maverick Records, which signed him in 2005. This didn't go well: the label folded before issuing any of Eric's material, so he found himself once again labelless. In 2006 he put out another independent album called ..Before I Sold Out, again including "Rock and Roll" on the tracklist. In 2007, Perez Hilton featured Hutchinson on his blog, which sent the album up the iTunes chart and got the attention of Warner Bros. Records, which signed him. Hutchinson's first album with Warners was Sounds Like This in 2008, again with "Rock and Roll" included. It wasn't until January 2009 that the song finally bubbled under on the Hot 100, reaching #107 for a week before dropping out.
• The song got a big boost in Australia when it was used on a 2009 episode of the TV series Packed to the Rafters and featured on the soundtrack. The song charted at #9 in that country.