Songfacts®:

• This is one of frontman Richard Butler's favorites from Made Of Rain, the first Psychedelic Furs album since 1991. The group was on hiatus from 1991 until 2000, when they re-formed to tour. "The Boy That Invented Rock & Roll" started showing up in their setlists in 2019, and a year later was the lead track on the album.
  
  The six band members who played on the album had been together since 2009, so they were a rather cohesive unit. Richard and his brother, the group's bass player Tim, were the only remaining original members, but saxophone player Mars Williams, who features prominently on this track, was with the band for much of the '80s.
• In a Songfacts interview with Richard Butler, he talked about what inspired this song:
  
  "It's kind of a list song of different feelings. I thought, 'What are these feelings about, what could they be, what could I make of them, how could I tie them together?' And I thought, 'Well, they are the kind of feelings that could have engendered rock and roll or the blues for that matter.'
  
  It starts out with the lyric:
  
  A flight of crows, my insect heart
  These ticking veins, the godless dark
  
  It's got this very pessimistic, very blues sounding bass, not in a blues music way but in the feeling, and I thought that could be the sort of feeling that engendered rock and roll, so that's where the title came from."