Rat a Tat

Album: Save Rock And Roll (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Fall Out Boy collaborating with Courtney Love. The band apparently had a great time recording with the Grunge icon. "There was a lot of camaraderie with her. She's out here a little bit, but she's real smart... You don't really realize, but she's circling everybody, very predatory. In a very intelligent way, she remembers all these numbers and weird stuff from years ago... She's cool," they smiled to Australian radio show hosts Kyle and Jackie O.

    They added that Love brought her own flavor to the song. "She offered a different perspective. At the end of the day, anything on the record, we wanted to wait until we were all really happy with it."
  • Love's snarl, "It's Courtney, bitch," at the beginning of the track is a nod to Britney Spears' cry of "It's Britney Bitch" on her "Gimme More" single.
  • This song came early in the Save Rock And Roll recording process and was built around a demo guitarist Joe Trohman had made, which vocalist Patrick Stump then worked on.
  • Stump told Kerrang! magazine: "I had held over the line, 'We're all fighting growing old...' from an old song a few years back. I loved Pete (Wentz)'s lyric so much that I was happy we found a song it worked on."
  • Wentz told Kerrang! that despite Courtney Love's tough image, she's actually quite nice. "Courtney gets a bad rap, but she was sweet," he said. "We e-mailed her some stuff and she wrote to it, too. So it was like Courtney kind of doing Fall Out Boy, letting rip, which was cool. When was the last time people heard Courtney like that? It's cool for people to remember she's not just a celebrity."
  • The song's music video sees Courtney Love leading an all-female evil army who hook Patrick Stump up to some equipment that brainwashes him into hating music. The promo is the ninth installment in The Young Blood Chronicles series of clips, which explain how the band ended up blindfolded in the back of the black van in "The Phoenix" visual.
  • Love's contribution was part of the pop-punk band's efforts to expand their sound by incorporating different music genres. Save Rock And Roll, their fifth album, finds them delving into the world of modern pop with producer Butch Walker, who worked with Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, Pink, and Panic at the Disco, among others.

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