Songfacts®:

• Written by The Cult lead singer Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy, this song is for the folks who don't always fit in. When we spoke with Ian Astbury, he explained: "It's really referring to the outsider. I think when you're a kid, you go to school, you find your peer group, you find your social group very quickly. And it becomes evident what kind of path is going to be laid out for you. I went to like 12 schools when I was a kid growing up, so I always found myself on the outside of the group. The typical definition is like the jocks versus the nerds - that's the classical boundary. But it's a little bit more complex than that.
  
  I immigrated to Canada when I was a kid, so I had quite an experience in school being an immigrant. They weren't really concerned about the color of my skin, my ethnicity, it was more about the fact that I was an immigrant. I was just thrown in with everybody else. I had one friend from Turkey, Ankara. I had another friend form Kingston, Jamaica - Leroy. There were native kids I used to hang out with, Iroquois kids, these two brothers. We used to hang out together, and that was my peer group. So it's about being the eternal outsider. I know where that place is."
• This is the first single from Choice of Weapon, the ninth album by the British rock band The Cult. Recording sessions began in March 2011 and over the next ten months took place at studios in New York City, Los Angeles, the band's Witch Mountain studio, and the California high desert. Frontman Ian Astbury explained the reasoning behind the album name to Spinner: "'Choice of Weapon' is the title, and it evolved through many permutations, like 'Weapon of Choice' or 'Choice of Weapons.' I had like 30. 'Choice of Weapon' struck me, since you're having a choice, as individuals and society, and the weapon is a metaphor or it could be a mantra. Or a knife or a gun. Or a pen. Your art, creativity can be your weapon of cultural revolution.
  
  It's spiritual, too. We can inflict violence or share knowledge, and this permeates throughout the songs, which are about experiences where I had to make a choice or decision. It's lyrically very intimate. It's loss, celebration and how can we not be caught up in the Occupy movement or the farcical political circus that we see every day? It's blasts of feel good rock 'n' roll, and it's more cinematic."