Songfacts®:

• Most songs that mention the Mona Lisa - Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting that hangs in the Louvre - use it as a comparison or a metaphor. The Mona Lisa of Mona Lisa songs is the classic by Nat King Cole where he likens a lady to the woman in the painting.
  
  Young The Giant's "Mona Lisa," though, is about the painting itself.
  
  "It's a song that we wrote in the band house, and it really was about the Mona Lisa, the concept of the piece of art, what is happening there, and also the way in which people perceive art and having that dubious honour of being the most famous of anything is like a statement in itself," lead singer Sameer Gadhia told Bluntmag. "I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time a few months ago. It was cool. It was very small. I do have a great photo, just a side profile of the Mona Lisa, but then it's just everyone else just taking the photos, jostling to really take the photos."
• The song is part of Young The Giant's 2026 album Victory Garden. By this time, they were putting out albums on roughly the same schedule as the World Cup: every four years.
  
  "With Victory Garden, I would say you're hearing the most collective energy we've had in a long time," guitarist Eric Cannata said on the Off The Record Podcast. "All five of us were in the room together for the entire process. With everyone's families around close by, a lot of distractions, a lot of life going on, we wanted to get out of town, and so we did writing retreats. Victory Gardens, during wartime, the government asked people to grow food for their communities, and it was a very communal thing where people were helping their neighbors grow different food, and our bass player, Payam, brought this idea to us. And it just resonated with us because a lot of the themes we were discussing as we were getting together in Joshua Tree and in Idyllwild were the idea of empathy and viewing the world through the eyes of children and trying to really look at our community and the things that we can control and the things that we can help grow and the idea of legacy and the idea of planting trees that will grow for the future generations to enjoy."