Songfacts®:

• The epic centrepiece of Everything Was Beautiful, "The Mainline Song" began as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of Spiritualized's 1995 song "Electric Mainline."
  
  Late in the process, Jason Pierce (Spiritualized was essentially his solo project at this point) came up with lyrics inspired by the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota and the subsequent protests towards the end of the first lockdown in 2020. "I hate to think of it as a political song but it was amazing that despite all the fear of the pandemic, people still stood up and said, 'No!' That was really f---ing important," he told The Sun. "It changed my instrumental into something extraordinary."
• The song contains a sample of one of those endless freight trains traversing the US. Pierce recorded the sound on his phone when he was traveling out of Los Angeles and gates came down on a Route 66 crossing. "I love - who doesn't love? - those trains that are three miles long and take 40 minutes to pass," Pierce commented to Uncut magazine. "It's beautiful. I think that was on the way out to the volcano on Route 66 outside LA. There's a track that crosses the highway there. I've got multiple recordings of those things."
• Pierce released "The Mainline Song" as the third single from Everything Was Beautiful on March 7, 2022. His experiences in lockdown inspired the album. "I felt like I'd been in training for this my whole life," the frontman said.