Songfacts®:

• This empowerment anthem is the title track to Sugarland's fourth studio album. In our 2010 interview with Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland, she told us: "I love the way the song came about musically. It hovered around for a couple of days in that I had that little piano part. I was playing around with that at home, and Kristian (Bush) and I came into the writing studio and we wrote part of the lyrics, the 'feels like I'm flying, wings made of light,' separately. We thought it was going to be a different song. We hadn't put anything together yet. We thought that was actually going to be the chorus of another song.
  
  And then we were also listening to some drums, some rhythm grooves at the time, and he started playing a guitar part. I said, 'Wait a minute. Let me go sit down at the piano here.' And it all came together, the cogs and the wheels just all started moving and aligning, and suddenly we were like, 'Oh, wait a minute. No, we're going to make this be reverse,' and the whole song just really unfolded in this really beautiful discovery. It was a discovery for us, as well. It's always really special when a song reveals itself in that way, where it goes to a refreshing discovery. Some of them you punch and kick and all of that, and some of them really reveal themselves, and 'Incredible Machine' definitely felt that way. And I love the metaphor, because it speaks to the human heart and the incredible machine that it is, and its exquisite capacity to love and to feel and to understand."
• The Incredible Machine is inspired by some of the artists Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles listened to in their teen years such as Blondie, Peter Gabriel, R.E.M. and The Clash. Nettles told The Boot that in recording The Incredible Machine the pair wanted, "to explore new territory and allow the genre to grow because, as we all know, if we don't grow we stagnate."
  Nettles added that the line, "Feels like I'm flying, wings made of light/brand new and shinin', like a shot rung out through the night," best sums up the bands rebirth. She explained: "That's a wonderful metaphor and image for this newly emerging creature that Sugarland is right now, with these vulnerable but beautiful wings. The Incredible Machine is definitely us, but at the same time, there is something very precious and new."