Songfacts®:

• The first single and title track of Godsmack's sixth studio album, the song came easily to the band. Singer Sully Erna told The Pulse of Radio: "It's one of those songs that surprisingly came out and was written from back to front in, like, an hour. I started putting one thing together with the next, and then Shannon [Larkin, drummer] started jumping in and then we arranged the whole song, and literally within an hour, maybe 90 minutes, this whole song was written and it was one of the last songs that we wrote, and it ended up becoming the first single."
• The song title stands for One Thousand Horsepower. The idea of horsepower, a unit of power standing for how much work one horse can do, was originated by James Watt (1736-1819), who developed the modern form of the steam engine. Because people at the time used horses to pull carts, it was an amount of energy that could be understood by most of the population.
• The song's original title took things to the next level. "Actually, the original title I wanted to put on the song was '100,000 Horsepower'," Erna told Pulse of Radio. "But unfortunately, rhythmically, it was too many syllables and I couldn't make it fit the way I wanted to creatively, so I trimmed it back to '1000 Horsepower', which is still pretty fu--in' powerful, by the way."
• Godsmack made a conscious decision to go back to the streets of Boston for their 1000hp album. Sully Erna explained that the title track, "recounts our days in the empty bars working our way up to those big stages we're so blessed to be on."