Songfacts®:

• Like their hit "Peaches," this is a track from The Presidents Of The United States Of America that is loaded with double entendre. In rock music, when we hear about a pussy purrin', it's typically about sex (see: "Cat Scratch Fever" by Ted Nugent). But this song could simply be about a cat, and that's the story Presidents Of The United States Of America frontman Chris Ballew is sticking with.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Ballew, he told the story. "That was a real cat," he said. "I was living with my old friend Mark Sandman from the band Morphine, who's the guy that turned me on to the two-string. We were having a little jam in his living room and his roommate's cat Shima came in. Shima was famous for going up to your leg and rubbing on it, and then when you reach down you get a handful of claw. So Shima was there, we were jamming, and I go into this riff. I just started singing, 'Kitty at my foot and I want to touch it.' For a long time that's all it was, it was a fragment that just did that over and over again. I recorded it on my 4-track with a banjo, made it a weird, distorted country thing, and as I'm putting songs together for the debut for The Presidents to play live shows and stuff, I heard that fragment and thought I'd develop that a little bit. So it came out of me wanting to touch an actual cat."
• Presidents Of The United States Of America signed to Columbia Records, which released their major-label debut in 1995. The first single was "Lump," a song about a woman who lives in a swamp. It got a lot of airplay, proving there was a market for their compact, goofy rock songs. "Kitty" was the follow-up, and then "Peaches." The album went on to sell over 3 million copies just in America.
• "Kitty" first appeared on Froggystyle, an independent album the band put out in 1994. At this point, it was called "Kitty At My Foot."
• The video, which is cat's-eye-view, was directed by Roman Coppola, who did all the videos for the songs on the first Presidents album.