Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of Lifehouse's fifth studio album. The group's bass player Bryce Soderberg explained to Bill Lamb why the record was named after this song: "It was the first song written for the record. It was kind of a Tom Petty influenced track. Basically what happened with how it ties in with the title of the record is we were out touring off of Who we Are, our last record. We wanted to kind of capture the essence and take a snapshot of what we were doing live in the studio for this record.
  
  So we kind of started doing these live, energetic, organic rock songs. We did about five or six of these with 'Smoke and Mirrors' being one of them, 'Nerve Damage' being another. About halfway through making the record we kind of realized we were missing an element that Lifehouse is thankful for that keeps the blood flowing, and that's the radio side, millions of radio spins.
  
  So we started collaborating with Kevin Rudolf and Chris Daughtry and started experimenting with the pop record. We started getting back to the record-making process. Then we came up with songs like 'Halfway Gone' and 'Had Enough.' So we had the two sides to Lifehouse on this record, the live, organic rock side and then there's the radio-friendly pop side. The hybrid of the two kind of ambiguously fit in with the name Smoke and Mirrors."