2010Released
3:52

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about The High Road. By Songfacts®.

This bluesy number is the lead single from the self-titled debut album of indie rock twosome Broken Bells. The duo comprises James Mercer of The Shins and Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse), who is one half of Gnarls Barkley. Mercer and Burton first met face-to-face backstage at the 2004 Roskilde Festival in Copenhagen and in May 2008 took the opportunity to collaborate on original music. One of their first fruits was the track, "Insane Lullaby," a song, which features on the 2009 Dark Night of the Soul Danger Mouse and Sparklehouse collaboration with David Lynch.

The record features Mercer on vocals, guitars and bass while Burton plays organ, drums, piano, synths and bass. The pair play all the instruments on the album with the exception of a full string section arranged by Daniele Luppi.

The Quietus commented to Mercer that the song's melody sounds Shins-like, whilst other tracks on Broken Bells show the influence of his indie rock band. Mercer replied: "There are probably elements that are similar. But it's also probably different in that Brian wrote some of it, so it doesn't all come from me. There are things that happen chord wise, and in the mathematics of song writing, that wouldn't have come up if it was just me writing on the song."
Danger Mouse added: "I don't think anything I ever did was trying to sound deliberate from The Shins. I think there's moments that sound like they could have come from The Shins, but that's because James' style and voice are very unique. And like James said, normally I would try something and come up with my own things musically, but knowing I was doing it with James I wasn't so worried because I knew once we worked together it would sound completely different. A lot of times when I was doing Gnarls it would just be myself in the studio and I would send a bunch of stuff out to see what was good, what did Ceelo like. This time, I was there crafting it with James so if there was I part I was stuck on or wasn't so sure about, or you know, he had an idea like 'Maybe you should do it this way'… it was much more of a collaboration. And it was good to put a bunch of ideas out there and have someone you respect in the studio say 'yay' or 'nay'."

Top Listeners

Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of The High Road.
CKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
80BPM

Album

The album The High Road is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released The High Road.
Columbia
(P) 2009, 2010 Sony Music Entertainment

See your Spotify stats (with number of plays and minutes listened) and discover new music.

Music data, artist images, album covers, and song previews are provided by Spotify. Spotify is a trademark of Spotify AB.

5.8MArtists
73.5MSongs
12.3MAlbums
6.3KGenres
2.5MLabels
493KPlaylists