Songfacts®:

• A play on the phrase "Vice Versa," which means "the other way around," this is the title track to Switchfoot's second album released on their own lowercase people label. Their frontman Jon Foreman told us that their successful debut album on the label, which was called Hello Hurricane, gave them, "A new sense of boldness and strength that comes from operating from a place where we're not afraid to say exactly what we mean and mean exactly what we say, and maybe in a way that we've never felt as a band before."
• This song is a look at natural wonder and our place in the world. Regarding the lyrics, "Where is God in the earthquake?," Foreman told us that he wrote the song long before the March 11, 2011 earthquake in Japan.
  
  Said the songwriter: "When we were finishing up Hello Hurricane was when I wrote that song. The first line of the songs is, 'Walking along the high tide line,' and that's where the song began. The high tide line - in the morning, you can tell where the ocean leaves its mark from the night before, and it washes up all the debris from the night before. So that's where that song begins, is kind of looking through the things that people didn't want, the trash from boats and beachgoers that they left behind for the Pacific to have its way with. And for me, I felt that it was a good place to start a song that's looking for meaning. So there wasn't one specific earthquake or one specific disaster in my life that inspired that song, but it was written out of a definite moment of frailty where you're looking for purpose and hoping to find it."