I'm Just a Kid

This song is about being a kid and feeling alone, like no one cares about you. The lyric is delivered with a wink, but it's rather painful, with lead singer Pierre Bouvier singing about being trapped in the house while everybody else is out having fun (or so it seems). "Every night is the worst night ever," he laments. The group could relate to these feelings of adolescent anguish because they were still in their early 20s when the song was released, with fresh memories of high school.

Directed by Ryan Smith and Frank Borin, the music video is a tie-in with the 2002 film The New Guy, with the film's stars DJ Qualls and Eliza Dushku playing similar roles, but with band members integrated into the story. "I'm Just A Kid" plays in the film and appears on the soundtrack.

This is one of the earliest Simple Plan songs, and one of the first that their songwriting team of lead singer Pierre Bouvier and drummer Chuck Comeau wrote together. Along with "I'd Do Anything," it's one of two songs on their debut album that was included on the original demo that earned them a record deal. In high school, Bouvier and Comeau were in a band called Reset, which was popular in the area, so life didn't suck that bad. Still, they both knew what it was like to search for a place to belong and to push back against the tides of conformity. In a Songfacts interview with Bouvier, he explained: "From early teenage life, having a band together we were exposed to the punk rock scene in Montreal and played a lot of shows at a very young age, so we identified with this counter culture, Southern California punk music that was coming out from Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph and some stuff from Europe, and just that whole vibe. We'd go to a show with these people with spiked hair and piercings, and we'd go in the mosh pit and just mosh and get out and then have to take the bus back to our parents' house. I think all of that put together made us feel like we found our place in the world and that we belong. We wanted to give voice to that whole scene - for the kids at the shows. So all that blended together and that's where it came from."