Songfacts®:

• "Knockin' Em Back" is about returning to booze after a long bout of sobriety. In it, Paul Westerberg sings about defiantly hitting the bottle and releasing his inner demons.
  
  I want to scream and shout
  Want to let the bad guys win, let 'em out
  
  The subject matter is heavy and the lyrics celebratory (on the surface, at least), but the sound is jangly and irreverent. Part of that sound stems from Westerberg recording this and every song on Come Feel Me Tremble, his fifth solo album, by himself at home. Another part comes from Westerberg's black humor and talent for avoidance.
  
  Westerberg, music, and alcohol have been intertwined since he got his start in 1979 as frontman for The Replacements, a band whose influence outshone their sales. Since their 1991 breakup, many have observed that the band's drunken debauchery stalled their broader success just as much as it appealed to their hardcore fanbase. They were as unpredictable and unruly in the studio as they were onstage, making it difficult for anyone to work with them.
• Replacements fans mythologized the band's drunken antics, and young Westerberg fed into the hype, but he revealed a more complex reality as he matured. His heavy drinking started mostly as a way to deal with stage fright and other negative emotions. He wasn't partying on tour so much as he was self-medicating.
  
  In 1990, around the time he started writing material for The Replacements' sixth and final studio album, All Shook Down (which he planned to be his solo debut before executives talked him back to the band), Westerberg's marital troubles made him realize he had a problem. He'd started drinking heavily at home even after tours ended, and the emotions the booze was masking had become deeper. He'd worked hard to be a rock star, but upon achieving that status realized he didn't like it very much. "It wasn't so much that I needed alcohol to face the audience," he says in Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. "I needed the alcohol to mask the disillusionment."
  
  Westerberg achieved 13 years of sobriety before drinking again during a 2013 tour the year he wrote and recorded this song. The boredom and stress of touring drove him to it, but in Trouble Boys he also blames his legacy: "I have no solid answer other than the fact that every article on me would usually start with 'The former hard-drinking frontman...' And it's like, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause I'm never gonna live that down."