Shake It

Metro Station came out of nowhere in 2007 with this high-energy hit with vaguely suggestive lyrics and a very repetitive chorus: Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake it... The magic is in the production, which came courtesy of the S*A*M and Sluggo team of Sam Hollander and Dave Katz, who were honing in on the boisterous new sound of the era - their other clients included Cobra Starship and Boys Like Girls. Hollander wrote the song with band members Trace Cyrus, Blake Healy and Mason Musso.

Trace Cyrus, Miley's older half-brother, was Metro Station's lead singer at the time. He was 18 when the song was released on their self-titled debut album in September 2007. The song wasn't released as a single until April 2008, and it reached its chart peak of #10 in the US in June. "Shake It" was also a hit overseas, making the Top 10 in Japan, Australia, the UK and several other territories. The follow-up single, "Seventeen Forever," didn't do nearly as well and the band fractured a few years later. They didn't release another album until 2015, when they returned with Savior.

Producer Sam Hollander put the beat together using Ableton Live software. A new pack had just come out, and he put it to use. "Suddenly you could push one button on Ableton and you could audition thousands of loops and they would immediately transform to whatever tempo you want," he told Songfacts. "So this happened to be the day that we were working on 'Shake It,' and I might have smoked some funny stuff. I locked myself in a room and I lost all track of time as I started layering percussive loop after percussive loop after percussive loop, and I really wanted to turn that 'shake it' into a post-chorus chant. I really wanted to make this thing arena worthy because it just felt so loud and obnoxious in all the ways that I love music. So I kept layering percussive loop after percussive loop, breakbeat after breakbeat. Time went by and I didn't realize I put 13 or 14 drum loops on top of each other, committing a musical crime in so many ways. We sent the track off to Tom Lord-Alge, and he mixed it. He called as he was laying it down and he said, 'You have 14 drum loops on top of each other here.' I was mortified because obviously I'm a hack and have no idea what I'm doing, so I just rationalized it. I said, 'It reminds me of the night in the Bahamas at Junkanoo Festival where all the percussion is loud and bombastic and exploding through the speakers.' He was nice enough to placate me and not call me out. So the way he mixed it, when the post-chorus hits it rattles in that way and you hear all this sort of sonic frustration. That's what I really love about it. My ineptitude and my bad choices might have helped us."