Laura Jane Grace told NME: "It's an angry song, 'Write me off, f---ing forget about me.' It's really just a 'f--- off' to negative people. The 'f--- you' attitude is what attracted me to punk when I was 13 years old."

Do you hear a Bruce Springsteen influence in this song? Bruce does. He told NPR: "'Black Me Out,' it's a fantastic song, you know. And so, any time where you feel you may have dropped a seed or two that someone picked up in any way is, it's just a pleasure. I mean it's like, 'Oh yeah, I did that little part of my work well,' in that this was an assistance and someone went and made something beautiful of their own or crazy of their own about it or whatever, however it comes out."

Grace explained the song's meaning to Spin magazine: "It's an angry song," he said, "and it's about feeling like you have certain relationships in your life where you have to fake the person that you are and be inauthentic and compromise yourself to people you work with or people you see out at a bar who corner you — who make you the kind of person that you aren't, really — and feeling like you're so angry that you just want to be like blacked out from someone's existence, like, 'F---ing forget about me, don't think about me anymore, I do not exist to you anymore.' That kind of feeling."