Songfacts®:

• This breezy, jaunty tune is a track from London-based Eliza Doolittle's debut album. The pop/folk singer-songwriter explained in press materials that the song is "about quitting worrying, getting up off your butt and getting on your rollerblades 'and rolling on.'"
• Doolittle used a child's toy drum kit for this song's percussion.
• This is one of two tracks co-written and produced by the influential late producer Jonny Dollar, the architect of Massive Attack's Blue Lines, the album that launched the trip-hop sound. Doolittle's debut set was one of the last projects Dollar worked on, before he died of cancer at the tragically early age of 45.
• This was released as Doolittle's first US single. "'Rollerblades' was the first song I wrote, and I knew I had something special with the sound," said the British songstress of the playful tune.
• Doolittle explained the song's meaning in an interview with Spinner: "'Rollerblades' was a song I wrote because I was on the Tube on my way to the studio. There was a guy on the Tube playing guitar and asking for money, and he must have not gotten a lot of change because he started having a go at everyone at the Tube. He basically got angry at everyone. So when I got to the studio that day, I was just chatting with Craigie [Dodds] and Jonny [Sharp], who I wrote the song with, about him. We just started talking about loads of other people just who kind of don't know what they want and take it out on everyone around them. The song is just about people like that, and we're all like that every now and again. We take things out on the people around us. It's just about realizing we're all in the same boat and if you can roll on and move on from it."