Songfacts®:

• This moody, atmospheric rocker has lyrics about being but a small crack in the "Castle of Glass," illustrating both belonging and futility. The song was born out of Linkin Park's less-than-traditional methods of recording. "Our writing process is a weird, amorphous thing," said Mike Shinoda to MTV News. "For some bands, just to put it in perspective, they jam, and then they write a song and then they record a song and then they mix it and finish it ... we don't do that," (laughs).
  
  "We do everything at once, every step of the way," he continued. "From the moment we're putting things down on the laptop, I'm already kind of mixing it a little bit [and] sometimes those things end up being songs, like 'Castle Of Glass,' [where] my vocal performance in the first part of that song, pretty much almost everything you hear in the beginning of the song was the very first demo. Like, that went from nothing there, to those things, and then the song got built."
• Like most of the songs on Living Things, the song's lyrical content can be interpreted in several ways. Chester Bennington explained to MTV News: "When Mike was talking about the lyrics, at one point he had said, 'You know, it's kind of like finding yourself as this broken part of this big machine, and feeling like you're not part of that, or trying to find your place in the bigger scheme of things.' And that can mean a solider coming home from war, and trying to fit back into society, or a person getting out of prison, or whatever.
  
  And here I am, envisioning this big, beautiful glass castle on a hill, and, like, unicorns. I'm thinking like 'Yeah, if you zoom in, I'm this little broken part of this castle that no one knows about, and I may seem like flawed and not important, but when you back up and look at the big picture, you're part of this really beautiful thing that keeps you together," he continued. "And it was a really interesting twist; I think a lot of our lyrics can be taken from multiple perspectives, depending on what you want the song to be about... they can be felt on so many different levels."
• This was released as a promotional single for the 2012 video game Metal Of Honor: Warfighter. The music video, which also features footage from the game, follows the story of a young boy whose father, a Navy SEAL, is killed in action. Meanwhile, the band performs in the midst of a raging storm. The clip closes with a quote from Winston Churchill: "All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope."
• Living Things is Linkin Park's fifth studio album. The band reworked all the tracks for the remix album Recharged in 2013.