Songfacts®:

• This song follows Panic! frontman Brendon Urie as he navigates the waters of fame and of a fickle and often predatory music industry:
  
  I'm a hooker sellin' songs
  And my pimp's a record label
  
  But these are merely the downsides of his dream. In the chorus, he reflects on his good fortune:
  
  Hey look ma, I made it
  Everything's comin' up aces
• The video features a playful puppet version of singer Brendon Urie, charting his ascent to stardom and descent into the gutter. Asked by Q Magazine how much it is based on his own life, he replied, "Maybe half. The dominatrix stuff - that's not real. The girls, the cocaine, that's real. But not excessively. Coke was never my thing. Weed was always more comforting."
• Urie wrote the lyric with Sam Hollander, a songwriter who has stayed out of the spotlight. Hollander was trying to imagine what Urie has to deal with in his role of superstar lead singer.
  
  "Brendon had written a chorus, and I got a call to mess around with some verse ideas," Hollander told Songfacts. "What I love about that is it's obviously dripping in theatricality - it's just so over-the-top. When I heard what Brendon wrote in that chorus, it felt like this was an introduction to a brand new era of the band, so I was just trying to summon some imagery in those verses to play off of that and fuel the fire."
• Jake Sinclair and Dillon Francis produced this track and are listed as co-writers. Francis, an electronic musician, also makes a cameo in the video just over halfway through.
• Along with Brendon Urie, Sam Hollander and the song's producers Jake Sinclair and Dillon Francis, Morgan Kibby and Michael Angelakos are also credited on this track. Angelakos is the lead singer of Passion Pit.
• This was the follow-up single to "High Hopes," which Sam Hollander and Jake Sinclair also had a hand in writing.
  
  "'Hey Look Ma, I Made It' and 'High Hopes' are two sides of a coin," Hollander said in a Songfacts interview. "One is dealing with the mental duress that can come with any form of success, and the other is just pure optimism and unbridled willingness to go for it. On both of these, I'm trying to summon Brendon's story with him."