Songfacts®:

• This is a track from Kaleidoscope Heart, the third studio album by singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. The Californian artist chose the title of the album from the lyric in the bridge of this song. She explained on her website: "It's the song that helped get me through my writer's block for this album. It's a very special song to me, and is how I chose the name for the record."
• Bareilles told Billboard magazine that this is the centerpiece song on the album. "I was worrying [to a friend] about how I was never going to be able to write another song, and I was starting a lot of songs but I couldn't finish any of them," she said. "I was really worried about stepping into the unknown and I didn't know what to expect the second time around... and that afternoon, I sat down and wrote 'Uncharted.'"
• Bareilles blogged regarding the album title: "I picked out the name of the record months before I even finished writing the songs. I love the imagery of those words, and they're really representative of how I envision my heart. It's a colorful but fragmented, ever-changing sum of all the bits and pieces that make it up. A Kaleidoscope is the tool that helps make sense of the mess. Or at least makes it nice to look at."
• Belying this song title, Bareilles scored her first number-one album and her best sales week ever when Kaleidoscope Heart topped the Billboard 200 chart with 90,000 sold on its debut week.
• The week Kaleidoscope Heart topped the Billboard 200. Bareilles' 2008 release, Little Voice re-entered the chart at # 200. Only on one previous occasion has an artist bookended the survey since its conversion to Nielsen SoundScan data in May 1991. On the chart dated Oct. 18, 2008, T.I. debuted at # with Paper Trail, while T.I. Vs T.I.P. re-entered at No. 200.
• The song's music video was released on March 1, 2011. Have a go at playing spot the celebrity when watching the clip - amongst the music artists who make cameo appearances are (in no particular order) - Ben Folds Josh Groban, Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles, Adam Levine and the rest of Maroon 5, OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder, Pharrell Williams, Ingrid Michaelson, Tegan and Sara and Vanessa Carlton.