Songfacts®:

• Wesley Schultz sings here about the corruption of fame as he portrays the ways Hollywood can crush the life out of wannabes. "The world sees you as being put on a pedestal but you are also put on a hamster wheel, and that does strange things to people," said Schultz. "Even a little bit of fame can distort perceptions, if people see you and react abnormally.
  
  "Back when we were working as bus boys to support our music, I felt invisible to the world. I remember thinking I could be naked and pick up a plate and no one would even notice," he added. "That's an interesting place to write from and I'm wary of losing it."
• After a few years of touring in support of their debut album, the Lumineers rented a house in Colorado for six months to brainstorm ideas for their sophomore release. Even though their first album boasted the hit "Ho Hey" and launched them into fame, the band admitted they still had a lot to learn about their craft.
  
  Lumineers drummer Jeremiah Fraites told BMI in 2016: "The writing between me and Wes has evolved in that we discriminate against more ideas. When we first started writing together and anybody had a song idea we would finish it to the end and put it on our MySpace - now, there's a more sophisticated and evolved filtering process. I have a good sense, and I think Wes does too, about what we show to each other, about what could be on LP three, or what could feel like some sort of movie soundtrack-esque thing."
  
  One of those "soundtrack-esque" tunes was "Gale Song," which was written for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
• The Lumineers found their footing in the nu-folk boom of the 2010s alongside acts like Mumford and Sons and Noah and the Whale, whose stripped-down acoustic anthems stood in contrast to the overproduced pop that dominated the charts. Even as the genre's popularity waned and once-popular folk acts disbanded, the Lumineers forged ahead with their trademark simplicity - though, not without giving themselves room to grow.
  
  "I think cleaning the clutter out gives it some distinction," Schultz explained in a 2016 interview with The Aquarian. "We're in this weird place where it's never been easier to record. There are a lot of toys and abilities to manipulate sound and build something up to extreme heights. A good song will translate whether it's a barren or sparse arrangement or whether it's built up. But you'll never really know how good a song is unless you start there, unless you start from that sort of bare bones arrangement. We feel like it would be fun maybe at some point to build songs up and do that."