Songfacts®:

• Tangled long-term relationships is the topic of the opening track of Feist's Metals album. The Canadian singer-songwriter sings about how, "a good man and a good woman bring out the worst in the other and also that she and her lover, "had the same feelings at opposite times."
• Feist was in a long-term relationship with Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene when she recorded the album, but rather than being about their partnership, the song appears to have been inspired by observing what happens to other couples she was friends with. The singer explained to The Observer how she noticed that after a few years together, its often the case that they are unable to see each other clearly anymore.
• The male voice on the track is a guy called Bry Webb who is the singer for a Canadian Indie Rock band called The Constantines. Feist commented to Q magazine, "He has a voice like he's drunk a pint of sand."
• The Metals title was partially inspired by the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which describes how the Aztec Indians decorated their homes and goods in gold whilst the Spanish Conquistadors' forged intricate weapons out of precious metals. "It was all dazzle," Feist explained to Spin magazine. "'Mettle' was also a frontrunner for the title. I told a couple of people but they didn't know what that word meant, so I kept having to define it, not to mention spell it."
• The song's music video was shot in Mexico by Martin De Thurah (James Blake, Glasvegas). It is a series of open-ended vignettes including a somewhat despondent Feist walking through the streets. She explained the clip's meaning in a post on her website, saying: "This video captures glimpses of something human, we get a peek inside something real between people -- could be loss, longing and love. A lot of things which is about being a human being ... It is told in a way where it opens up more aspects than it concludes.You could think about the video like a song or a poem, and different people will connect to different things -- and those connections might be different from time to time when they watch it."