3 Doors Down lead singer Brad Arnold writes the lyrics to their songs, and on this hard-edged anthem about escaping to a better life, he got some help from his bandmates expanding the song.

The group’s bass player Todd Harrell told Song Facts:

That’s one of our heavier songs we ever wrote. We were sitting around writing one day and Brad was talking about some southern rock songs, and ‘Put me on a train, mama,’ that just came out, and it was really cool.

We took that line and ended up writing the whole song to ‘put me on a train, mama.’ That’s a fun song to play."

This song has an old-school Southern Rock feel to it. Guitarist Chris Henderson discussed its sound with The Toledo Free Press:

People have been trying to pigeonhole us as a Southern Rock band since the day we came out. We’re really not that kind of band; we’re pretty much a Modern Rock band. Our sound isn’t Southern.

There’s a few swampy things here and there, but typically, it’s universal and it works everywhere. With a song like ‘Train,’ when you hear it, it’s a Southern Rock song, for sure. It’s got all the typical things, and the lyric content is pretty Southern, too. But it still has the 3 Doors Down flavor to it, and we did something different that no other Southern Rock band does: We tried different tunings so it didn’t sound Southern but still is.

A lot of bands that are on the brink of being pigeonholed as Southern bands – we’re not really on the brink, there’s no chance of that happening to us at this point – but people still say it. So I think it took a little bit of balls to record that song."