Songfacts®:

• Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine sings the hook on this one, telling his girl that his heartbeat is a stereo that plays for her. Gym Class Heroes frontman Travie McCoy fills the verses with more music metaphors, at one point asking if she would keep him on her shoulder and change out his batteries if he was a 50-pound boombox.
• "Stereo Hearts" was the first single from Gym Class Heroes' fifth album, The Papercut Chronicles 2. It was released on June 14, 2011 and got some heat when Adam Levine talked it up on The Voice, which was in its first season (he was a judge on the show). The song rose to #4 in the US in October and went on to post massive streaming numbers, earning over 500 million views on YouTube and nearly that many on Spotify.
• The song was produced by the pop hitmaker Benny Blanco, whose resumé includes #1s for Kesha ("TiK ToK") and Katy Perry ("California Gurls," "Teenage Dream").
• "Stereo Hearts" started life as a song written by the upstart songwriters Dano Omelio, Brandon Lowry and Ammar Malik; Omelio and Lowry worked under the name Robopop, and also produced Lana Del Rey's hit "Video Games." Lowry used the pseudonym Sterling Fox for his Robopop work and records under the name Baby Fuzz. When he appeared on the Songfacts Podcast, he told the story behind the song.
  
  "It was originally more of an emo-pop-punk thing," he said. "We were pitching it to artists to record for their albums and somebody at Fueled By Ramen / Atlantic Records heard the chorus and it became this bastardized - in a good way - hodgepodge of a bunch of different people collaborating on this one song. It turned into this entity of rapping and singing, but the original song was me and two other people that we wrote on a piano.
  
  The label had us cut out the original verses. They took the chorus and sent it to the legendary producer Benny Blanco. He then made the song around the chorus and took some of the original demo parts, then sent it to Travie McCoy from Gym Class Heroes, who did the raps.
  
  It started to take shape, it started to be awesome, then Adam Levine jumped on the hook because he was friends with Benny. He wrote the bridge and suddenly we have a song. They didn't know whose song it was - is it a Maroon 5 song? Is it Gym Class Heroes? It ended up being Gym Class Heroes featuring Adam Levine.
  
  Before that I was literally broke and about to move back in with my parents. My partner and I had been working on pop songs for two years with no luck, and we were about to quit. Then a few weeks after that, this happened and it became a life-changing song."
• Travis McCoy found working with Levine inspired him to push on to the next level with his own vocals. The Gym Class frontman told MTV News: "It's a fun love song at the end of the day, and it's definitely got a summertime vibe. And having Adam bless us with his vocal stylings doesn't hurt much," McCoy said. "He just destroyed it. Watching that dude do [vocal] runs, and first he belts out the hook, and I'm like, 'OK!' then he does overdubs and he's like, 'Nah, I don't like that, I can do better.'"
• Matt McGinley explained the Hiro Murai-directed visual to MTV News. Said the GCH drummer: "The video basically plays on the idea that we're sort of just being casual, hanging out, being ourselves and our shadows get wild and get loose. It's kind of fun. I've always felt like my shadow has been trying to kill me for 28 years."
• Adam Levine's contribution was an unexpected surprise for the band. Guitarist Disashi Lumumba recalled to Billboard magazine in a July 2011 interview: "We were actually in the studio rehearsing collectively as a band about a month ago for a show in California. We had never practised the song all together before. Adam Levine just happened to be there with his people from The Voice and we were playing the song and all of a sudden, Adam just flies through the door and starts singing the chorus. It was pretty amazing."
• McCoy explained the song's meaning to MTV News: "We worked with Benny Blanco on this single, and the chorus kind of jumped out at me, the whole metaphor for your heart being a stereo. Lyrically, I played off that, just imagining my heart being inanimate objects like dusty records and old-school boom boxes and whatnot."
• McKinley told Billboard magazine that getting Adam Levine on board this song was fitting as Maroon 5 had been an influence on the band since their early days. "We've been following Adam and Maroon 5's career since their first album," he said. "Actually, when we went in to cut The Paper Chronicles we brought Songs For Jane, the Maroon 5 record, as a reference of what we wanted some of our drum tones and guitar tones to sound like. So to have [Levine] on there was a really cool thing. It kind of brings it full circle in a way."