[From AV Club article re use of song in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp]
http://www.avclub.com/article/wet-ho...t-day-c-224245
AVC: This was a moment that clearly needed a specific type of song.
CW: Yeah, definitely. Originally they had temped in “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” by Bad Company, so we knew that was going to be a song moment. And I knew I wanted the score to flow seamlessly into it, so it would be like a rock opera moment. I personally did not think “Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy” was enhancing the scene enough to push for it as one of the important songs to license. I thought I could beat it—not as a song, but as a dramatic moment. Jefferson and I were sitting around with another member of my team, Matt Novack, who is the composer for Childrens Hospital. We were writing that whole huge climax section, which is wall-to-wall score and pretty big orchestral score surrounding “Let’s Rock” and “Higher And Higher” in the finale. We knew we wanted it to be this big rock opera moment.
If I knew a moment wanted a song, but I didn’t know what it wanted, I would just click play on whatever song popped into my mind on Spotify or iTunes. So I played “We Will Rock You,” which obviously worked because it’s “We Will Rock You.” I played “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac, which worked really well in a totally different way. I wanted to capture this sort of dread in it. I didn’t want it to be, like, a triumphant anthem. “We Will Rock You” and “Tusk,” they’re songs that were scary to me as a kid, but also totally anthemic and they transcend the era in which they were made. I wanted the song to have the word “rock” in it, like so many of those classic rock-anthem songs. Lyrically we hadn’t done that yet, and it seemed very era-appropriate. Jefferson had this chord progression he was working on, but he was frustrated with it, so I took the parts he thought were good and started from there. It has my favorite lyric from the Wet Hot songs, which is “School’s through / What you wanna do / Let’s rock,” and the next line is “Kids rule / Ridin’ with the deuce / Let’s rock.”