The All-American Rejects chatted with Genius about their classic song “Dirty Little Secret.” The song appeared on the band’s second album, 2005’s Move Along. The upbeat song is driven by a tantalizing chorus: “I’ll keep you my dirty little secret/Don’t tell anyone or you’ll be just another regret.” The song became the band’s first top 10 track on the Billboard Hot 100.
In a video available to watch now, band members Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler explore the song line by line, how the track came together, why it took two years to get the record off the ground, how it marked a sonic transition, the importance of a great bridge, and more.
During the segment, the band discusses the ways fans interpret the song. “I don’t know how many people have come up to us after the fact and said, I heard this in middle school, and I was really closeted, and this was my anthem for my sexuality and my awakening. It’s just so surprising how something that was born inside you can be received in so many different, really profound ways.”
In another part of the clip, the band explains how the song was “the moment we crossed over from alternative rock into pop.”
“That’s why we were hesitant about ‘Dirty Little Secret’ at first. A lot of bands in our genre didn’t make that jump. It felt like that moment in Field of Dreams when James Earl Jones steps off the field and says, ‘I’m a doctor now.’ Like, okay—we’re a pop band now. And that hung over us for a long time, because in the mid-2000s, it wasn’t cool to be a pop band. We were the band that left Warped Tour, played something like David Letterman, and then came back—and everything felt different.”
