AG: [Laughs.] It’s amazing the coincidences that came together. Really, it started separate, as two ideas. On my side, I had this conversation with my grandfather, and he had been really moved by Captain Sully Sullenberger, who had crash landed that plane safely. He was the one who came to me talking about “a real human being and a real hero.” That was my grandpas’ words, so I should credit him for that. And at the same time, I was like, how can I make this into a cool song, something about a hero. Then after a couple months, totally coincidental, David sends me this instrumental, titled “A Real Hero,” already …
DG: I wanted to give a homage to that lonely hero that we see in movies like Mad Max … people who make their own choice and try to save lives. I want to give an homage. It was a coincidence.
AG: So really it came together like that, the first half of the song is very much Mad Max inspired. We are really inspired by films, and it was the thought of his character. And the second verse, the inspiration was Sully Sullenberger.
DG: When we finished the EP, I wanted to make video for the track, and I asked a friend from L.A. to shoot something inside the L.A. River.

AG: That was a video concept we had had! [via Vulture]

A crude but often revealing method of assessing male bias in lyrics is to take a song written by a man about a woman and reverse the sexes. By this test, a diatribe like [the Rolling Stones’] “Under My Thumb” is not nearly so sexist in its implications as, for example, Cat Stevens’ gentle, sympathetic “Wild World”; Jagger’s fantasy of sweet revenge could easily be female—in fact, it has a female counterpart, Nancy Sinatra’s “Boots” — but it’s hard to imagine a woman sadly warning her ex-lover that he’s too innocent for the big bad world out there.* [music critic, feminist, and thinker Ellen Willis’ 1971 essay “But Now I’m Gonna Move” via Jezebel]