Kryptonite Loser Be Like That 3 Doors Down

Kryptonite Album: The Better Life (2000)
Loser Album: The Better Life (2000)
Be Like That Album: The Better Life (2000)
by 3 Doors Down

Picture this: 3 Doors Down lead singer/songwriter Brad Arnold at 15 years old, sitting in math class bored out of his skull, begins tapping on his desk. The tapping turns into drumming, and pretty soon he's unknowingly written the first monster hit for his future band. Kryptonite.

He laughs at the memory: "Thank God for the little dude that sat in front of me, that dude deserves credit on the album! I was so bad in math. So bad. But my teacher knew I was not good, not paying attention, but he just kind of let me go. I believe I wrote the lyrics to some other songs in that same class. I wrote probably about half of that Better Life album sitting in that math class."

Kryptonite is also, according to Arnold, only the 3rd or 4th song he'd ever written, period. "The skippy little drumbeat in the song was just me beating on my desk. It's almost exactly the beat we played to, just kind of drumming, just skipping along with it."

Brad says Kryptonite is a question. As it turns out, it was a rather prophetic one. "Its question is kind of a strange one. It's not just asking, 'If I fall down, will you be there for me?' Because it's easy to be there for someone when they're down. But it's not always easy to be there for somebody when they're doing good. And that's the question it's asking. It's like, 'If I go crazy, will you still call me Superman?' It's asking, 'If I'm down, will you still be there for me?' But at the same time, 'If I'm alive and well, will you be there holding my hand?' That's kind of asking, 'If I'm doing good, will you be there for me? Will you not be jealous of me?' And maybe throughout the years of singing that song, I might have come up with more meanings for it than it actually might have originally had," he laughs.

The fact that he wrote Kryptonite when he was only 15 doesn't seem remarkable to Brad, because, he says, "every 15-year-old has those questions in their head. They might not know quite how to say it, or they might not feel like it's acceptable to say something. And the biggest thing that I've had as an honor to be able to do is to be able to say something, and after I say it, it's okay. After an artist says it, if a rock star says it, okay, it's fine. That really boils down to why rock and roll inspires pop culture so much, or just music in general, not just rock and roll. Because artists push the envelope, and they go out on a limb to say something else. But it also comes with responsibility; you gotta watch what you say, because kids listen. And I try to watch what I say, too."

Commonly thought to contain a shout out to the movie Superman ("Kryptonite" is the substance that rendered Superman powerless - it could only be found on his home planet of Krypton), and to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Brad says this song has neither. He explains how it all came together: "That line is just like a happenstance line. That song is so little about Superman. It's just really about that question. That's just something that everybody can identify with." He says that it was either Part I or II of the Superman movies that had Superman fighting an enemy in space, where they floated around to the dark side of the moon. He says, however, that he wrote this song before the movie came out. "And I was like, 'What?!' he laughs. "And it was after I wrote that song. That was weird." (Check out our full interview with Brad Arnold)

Bassist Todd Harrell explained that the band's name came from a sign in a building. It was saying about how some office was "doors down," and they added the number three to make it a catchy name.

Loser is a song, explains Brad Arnold, about one of his buddies from when he was a teenager. "He was from a good family, but he just kind of got mixed up in cocaine and stuff." Arnold says that the point of the song is not him calling his friend a loser; in fact, he says, despite the title, he's actually not. Rather, the song is about his friend's self doubt, and how he internalized his feelings. "Thankfully," says Arnold, "he's doing a lot better now. And I get a lot of people saying they can really identify with that song in some way. I think everybody feels like that every now and then."

Brad takes a moment to go through the first few lines of the song: "The idea that it's like breathing right away and all that, it's really in the chorus, just really talking about the physical act of doing it, and how the physical act makes you feel. And I could identify with it, because I've done it (cocaine) a couple of times when I was a teenager, and I just never did it like he did it. And I wouldn't ever do it again. And so I knew how it made me feel, and that was always one of those things with me that I could feel that monkey pulling, and I was like, Uh-uh. And a lot of people just couldn't. But the verse is really about the physical act of taking the drug, and the choruses are basically kind of looking for the outcome of the inevitability of sooner or later it's gonna kill you."

As much as Brad loves people digging for meaning in his songs, he never gets frustrated when he hears an interpretation that differs from his original intent. Unless the interpretation if offered by his young nephew. He tells this story: "My nephew, when he was about 3 or 4, and we were on tour for the Better Life record, his words to this song were, 'you're pushing me off of lobster legs.' And for the next 6 months, every time I played that song, I was standing there trying not to sing, 'You're pushing me off the lobster legs.' That's more the frustrating interpretation that I'm talking about," he laughs.

"Be Like That was strange, because I wrote the verses and the choruses at two completely different times. And I couldn't think of the verse for the chorus, or the chorus for the verse." Until one night driving home from band practice, the singer had an epiphany, "and I was sitting in my car singing, and I put those two together, and I was like, Duh. And I went home and just got a three chord structure going for the melody of it, and took it to practice the next day, and I asked Chris to make something out of it, and he came back the next day and he had it, and it just went from there."

Arnold confesses to having no ability to play guitar, so when he writes a song, it's more like "chicken pecking" notes, and it can be a long process.
According to Arnold, this song is about following your dreams. "And I know everybody has 'em. It's not also just about following your dreams, though. It's kind of a little bit about dreams that you've missed, and a little notion of regret, also."

The person in the first verse of Be Like That is fictional, and Arnold left it open to interpretation on whether that person is older or younger. He explains: "It's just kind of an idea. And it's kind of weird. Maybe it doesn't have a perfect string full of lyrics in that first verse, and for me I've never thought it had a perfect one, because it's almost suggesting that it's an older person, but in a lot of ways it's kind of suggesting it's a younger person. But I left it like that because I want things to be like that. I want it to be like it would be interpreted a lot of different ways. I don't do it so much anymore, but I used to think that when I write lyrics, I tried to do every line to where it could be taken more than one way. And my thought process behind that was, Well, if I can get two meanings out of it, then there are countless meanings out there for somebody else to apply it to their own life."

He also offers this bit of philosophy: "The difference in a good song and a great song, to me, is the difference in a good book and a good movie: They're both telling you the same story. They both have the same outcome. But whereas the movie is telling you exactly what to see and be heard, the book kind of lets you see whatever your mind comes up with, and it makes it a lot more applicable to your life in a lot of ways." (Check out our full interview with Brad Arnold)

With a small edit to the first lines of Be Like That, this song was re-recorded and used in the movie American Pie 2. This version is known as the "American Pie 2 Edit."

In the second verse, the lyrics "She spends her days up in the Northpark" refer to The Northpark Mall in Mississippi, where the band is from.

This was one of the tracks on 3 Doors Down's debut album. The next year, it was included on the compilation Now That's What I Call Music!, Vol. 8.