Munich

Lying in a 17 mile tunnel miles deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the aim of allowing physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, particularly for the existence of the "God Particle," which holds everything together.

The Fray singer Isaac Slade penned this up-tempo soft rock tune about some of the scientific questions being raised by the collider. He explained to interviewer Mike Ragogna: "I have a sweet spot for science - I think it's one of the most artistic professions out there. There's this large particle collider out in Switzerland that is kind of helping scientists peel back the curtain on what creates gravity and mass. Some very big questions are being raised, even some things that Einstein proposed, that have just been accepted for decades are starting to be challenged. They're looking for the God Particle, basically, the particle that holds it all together. That song is really just about the mystery of why we're all here and what's holding it all together, you know?" (Source The Huffington Post)

So what has this to do with the titular city of Munich, which is a few hundred miles away from the collider? Simply the song was birthed in the German city - it started with a little guitar riff that Isaac Slade wrote there - and the band turned it into a song at a sound check. Slade told Denver Westword: "We were doing a show in Munich, and I was reading a story about the neighboring particle collider they'd been working on in Switzerland and France. They're searching for the limit...they're standing on the edge of everything we know in science and trying to figure out what makes up 90 percent of the mass of a molecule and how it relates to the world."