Songfacts®:

• Keith Urban opens his The Speed of Now Part 1 album with this energetic, electronically enhanced cut. The country trap artist Breland joins Urban crooning the hook and co-writing the track. "'Out the Cage' began with this idea I had to build upon a '90s English house breakbeat rhythm; I've always loved Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, those kinds of rhythmic energies that make me wanna break something," explained Urban to Apple Music. "The chorus melody was taken from a quick banjo riff I kept playing. Breland said we should sing over that riff, and so this frenetic song about breaking out from whatever confinement and oppression that was imprisoning us took off."
• This was one of three or four The Speed of Now Part 1 tracks written during the Covid lockdown. Though the song's lyrical content about freeing yourself reflects the circumstances Urban found himself in, the singer told The Boot it has a more general meaning than quarantining.
  
  "When we were writing the song," he explained, "I said, 'I really, really want this to be a song that speaks to liberation of all sorts, even if that's somebody in a dead-end job, somebody that's stuck in a relationship that's going nowhere and they can't get out, someone who's sort of imprisoned in their own mind."
• So how did Urban hook up with Breland? He explained to Billboard that after "My Truck" and a few other things he did in 2019 attracted his interest, he read an interview that Breland did around June 2020. "The way he was talking about music and his creative process, it just spoke to me," said Urban. "I didn't know him. I got his phone number from a friend and I just cold-called him."
  
  Urban invited Breland to his studio and they ended up writing three songs together, including The Speed of Now Part 1 tracks "Out the Cage" and "Soul Food."
• Nile Rodgers plays guitar on the track. The Chic co-founder previously worked with Urban on his 2016 Ripcord song "Sun Don't Let Me Down," which also featured rapper Pitbull.
• The Speed of Now Part 1 album title came to Urban in October 2019 when he did a couple of the C2C (Country To Country) shows. "I was traveling around and started to notice people everywhere were moving faster," he explained to The Sun newspaper. "The album title is a dark, comedic dig at the absurdity of that."
• The video is a frantically paced stream of imagery and performance shot in Sydney, Australia, that captures the song's driving intensity. Urban and Breland had to go to extreme measures to film the clip, as local lockdown rules dictated they had to quarantine for two weeks prior to shooting. Nile Rodgers filmed his parts separately in Connecticut.