Reboot The Mission

Album: Glad All Over (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the first single from Glad All Over, The Wallflowers' first album in over seven years. The record was recorded at Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville and joined frontman Jakob Dylan with original bandmembers Greg Richling and Rami Jaffee, together with longtime band guitarist Stuart Mathis and drummer Jack Irons.
  • Former Clash member Mick Jones supplied vocals and guitar for this song, which was made available for free on July 24, 2012. A number of critics have compared the track's groove to that of Clash's 1981 single "The Magnificent Seven."

    "It would be preposterous for me to say ('Reboot the Mission') doesn't sound like the Clash. That was our intent. I even mention Joe Strummer in the song," Dylan told Billboard magazine. "So we thought, 'Let's take it all the way home and see if we can't get Mick to participate somehow. I've met him a handful of times throughout the years and just saw him when he played in L.A. with Big Audio Dynamite...so he was fresh on my mind. He mentioned doing something together, so I just called and he was into it."
  • Jakob Dylan grew up listening to The Clash, and the song's reggae and hip-hop inspired sound was very much inspired by the iconic British band. "We did that on purpose," said the Wallflowers frontman to Spinner. "But we'd had a lot of discussions about that stuff. There's the really dominate Clash songs everyone knows, but there was a lot of stuff on Sandinista! or the second side of London Calling that was very different than some of the more topical or radio songs people knew.

    We always appreciated that, and there seems to be a space missing," added Dylan. "No one was really attempting to do that - to do these songs that people could dance to. But it wasn't dance music, per se. It was a rock band somehow pulling it off and not in a modernized way you hear today, where people are begging to be in that form."
  • Dylan told Spinner that despite the Clash's influence, he stills sees "Mission" as more "natural" than contrived. "That four-on-the-floor beat you hear at the top of that song shouldn't be that foreign to people that listen to the Wallflowers," he said. "That's nearly the same drumbeat as 'One Headlight.' It's just everything else has shifted."
  • The lyrics, "Welcome Jack, the new drummer. He jammed with the mighty Joe Strummer," are a reference to drummer Jack Irons' backing of Clash frontman Joe Strummer on his 1989 solo album Earthquake Weather.
  • Glad All Over debuted at #48 on its first week on the Billboard 200. The artist directly below the Wallflowers was Jakob Dylan's father Bob, whose Tempest album was placed #49 in its fifth week on the survey.
  • The music video features various close-up shots of the band performing the song in a studio interspersed with break dancers doing their moves. The street dancers were spotted by the band on YouTube and brought to Los Angeles for the clip.

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