Songfacts®:

• Lumineers lead vocalist and guitarist Wesley Schultz and drummer Jeremiah Fraites started as a duo based in New York before relocating to Denver, Colorado because of the lower cost of living there. The classically trained Neyla Pekarek joined them in Denver and the trio started recording music in the living room of Schultz and Fraites' apartment. This haunting raw ballad - which the band describes as "a sort of breakup song with New York City" - was recorded in one take in that living room, and if you listen closely you can hear birds chirping through the open window.
• The band proudly delivered their home-recorded track to the studio, but their intention to use that version on the album was met with derision from their producer and the rest of the team at Seattle's Bear Creek Studio. "It was a special moment and they said, 'No, it's not going to sound right, it wasn't done in a professional studio,' and they laughed," Schultz recalled in a 2012 Interview magazine feature. "What does that even mean? I think that's been our attitude all along - we just believe in stuff. We believe in ourselves and in our material."
• With tunes like their seminal hit "Ho Hey," the Lumineers were crafting a happy-go-lucky image through uplifting storytelling and simple instrumentation, but they didn't want to box themselves into a specific style. That's why they included the electric guitar on tracks like "Slow It Down," so they'd have room to evolve their sound on future albums. Jeremiah Fraites, the group's drummer and piano player, told Post To Wire in 2013:
  
  "If the whole record was very smooth and clean and acoustic we would have boxed ourselves into a hole. Putting guitar on two or three of those songs toward the end of the record was done completely on purpose because we wanted to give ourselves an out, if we so chose to do that for the second album."
  
  On their followup, Cleopatra, the Lumineers didn't lean into the electric elements they incorporated on their debut, but they did experiment with some blue-eyed soul with the track "In the Light," while their third release, III, represented a thematic shift with a dark exploration of drug addiction and its impact on a fictional family.
• The album cover is a childhood photo of Schultz's mother, Judy, with her own mother. Judy thought it was a fitting photo to represent the band's debut. The singer told People in 2013: "My mom had a funny take on it: It's our first album, kind of our baby, like this child."