Songfacts®:

• England has many wayward youths who cause more than their share of trouble, and The Heavy lead singer Kelvin Swaby saw this firsthand when one of his relatives fell on the wrong side of the law. In our 2010 interview with Swaby, he explained: "He was like 15, and got into a whole heap of s--t with the police. And it was really, really bad. And at the moment in Britain, youth culture is on the rise. So many children are carrying knives around and there have been so many deaths within the past couple of years through kids just sticking kids. It's absolutely ridiculous. And the situation I was writing about was very, very similar to what I've just described. I'm not gonna go into the full detail, but it was very, very harrowing for the whole family."
• With a hectic touring and recording schedule, The Heavy spend a lot of time in airports, which is where a lot of their songwriting happens. For this song, Swaby was in an airport with guitarist Dan Taylor when the inspiration struck. Said the Heavy frontman: "I was in the airport writing this beat, and then I start doing this humming. So I did the humming, came up with the beat, and I took it to Dan. He immediately started playing something like straight out of a Western. I said, 'Yeah, this is the road that we need to go down.' Because it reminds me of that whole sentiment of the bad guy coming into town and being run out of town, if you see what I mean. So that was the whole sentiment of 'Short Change Hero.' We needed to go about it like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. I think it works. That was really, really cool."
• Listen to the beginning of this song, which invokes Old West villains in cowboy boots walking into town. Says Swaby: "That was Dan walking in cat litter. Admittedly, he did do it in cowboy boots. And the cat litter was clean. But that was such attention to detail. We wanted people to think we'd written that from a film. And so many people have said, 'What film does that come from?' It's great. It's really, really cool when you sound like something you wanted to sound like."