Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 09/21/2011 at 11:34 AM News

The Popdust Files: lindsay lohan, weezer

Butch Walker, rocker and producer for P!nk, Avril Lavigne, Katy Perry and various pop-rockish others, has accumulated a lot of stories during his songwriting career and is the type to go off about them during interviews. It’s a combination MTV Hive noticed, and the crapshoot question like “What are some weird stories about your life” resulted not in some half-hearted anecdotes but some really good stuff: Weezer not knowing Meat Loaf, Lindsay Lohan freaking out about her voice cracking, and–among other tales–the topic of our headline.

Normally it’s depressing to learn how your pop-song sausage is made, whether it involves songwriting camps or artists bragging about how they wrote their No. 1 hit in five minutes while still in bed hungover and scrawling on the wall by the mattress. (But hey, you could say the same of certain works of lofty classic literature that’s so lofty because the artist was paid by the word, or legendary, endlessly explicated plays with tons of scatological pandering written in so the crowds wouldn’t fall asleep. Don’t turn this into a pop-music thing; you’ll be wrong.) It’s not entirely depressing, though, to read this telling:

I was in my studio late one night and got hammered. I started joking with a buddy and played these solemn chords on my piano, but singing lyrics about a girl who liked rap-metal and had a monster truck.

That song, finally, is… Bowling for Soup’s “Girl All the Bad Guys Want,” which MTV Hive points out got a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Group or Duo. Performance and songwriting are two entirely different things, either of which can tarnish or redeem the other, but still. Now we turn it over to you, reader. Choose a reaction: “I knew it!” “…OK?” or “You’re just hating. Hater.”