Songfacts®:

• Toy soldiers can break over time, and so can boy soldiers. Jack White of The Raconteurs told Uncut the meaning behind the song: "I guess it was about breaking out, like it's time for everybody to grow up, kind of thing. There's a feeling when all your friends are musicians and nobody has a real job, you wonder how long this is going to last and how long it's going to be before people start - not getting a real job necessarily, but treating people with respect and acting more responsibly. That was the second song we wrote, and that's when I knew things were going to get interesting."
• "Broken Boy Soldier" is the title track to the first Raconteurs album. Jack White formed the band in 2005 with Brendan Benson, who had been recording as a solo artist. They wrote the song together.
  
  Jack White's band The White Stripes was still active, but it wasn't unusual for him to be in multiple bands at once - in 1998 he was in two others along with The White Stripes.
  
  The Raconteurs released a second album in 2008 that led to yet another band for White. After touring with The Kills that year, White teamed up with their frontwoman, Alison Mosshart, and formed The Dead Weather, which released albums in 2009, 2010, and 2015. The Raconteurs didn't release their next album until 2019 when they returned to action with Help Us Stranger.