Songfacts®:

• Pharrell Williams' jaunty production on this fulsome down-and-dirty track features whistling and a chopped guitar lick. It was after hearing Cyrus cover Dolly Parton's "Jolene" for one of her Backyard Sessions videos that the Neptunes producer decided that he wanted to work with the former Disney star. "He didn't come in and try to fix me," Cyrus said in the MTV documentary Miley: The Movement. "He knew I had a vision and that it was going to happen for me because I was clear, but I didn't know necessarily what my sound was going to be."
• Cyrus was blistering in her dismissal of her earlier tween Pop career during the promotion for Bangerz. This lewd embrace of sex is one of several tracks on the album where she completely distances herself from her Hannah Montana past.
• American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens penned Cyrus an open letter in which he critiqued the singer's grammar in this song. He wrote: "Dear Miley. I can't stop listening to #GetItRight (great song, great message, great body), but maybe you need a quick grammar lesson. One particular line causes concern: 'I been laying in this bed all night long.' Miley, technically speaking, you've been LYING, not LAYING, an irregular verb form that should only be used when there's an object, i.e. 'I been laying my tired booty on this bed all night long'. Whatever."
  
  "I'm not the best lyricist," he continued, "but you know what I mean. #Get It Right The Next Time. But don't worry, even Faulkner messed it up. We all make mistakes, and surely this isn't your worst misdemeanor."
  
  "But also, Miley," Stevens added, "did you know the tense here is also totally wrong. Surely you've heard of Present Perfect Continuous Tense (I HAVE BEEN LYING in this bed all night long [hopefully getting some beauty sleep?]). It's a weird, equivocal, almost purgatorial tense, not quite present, not quite past, not quite here, not quite there. Somewhere in between. I feel that way all the time. It kind of sucks. But I have a feeling your 'present perfect continuous' involves a lot more excitement than mine."