Songfacts®:

• The Raconteurs have been criticized in some quarters for being derivative of other bands. The Sun newspaper May 8, 2008, asked Jack White if he minded how his music is constantly compared with others. The Raconteurs frontman replied: "I think a lot of critics and listeners don't realize that there are two types of songwriters. Some listen to songs and rip them off and some write songs that end up sounding like someone else. On 'These Stones Will Shout,' there's a part in there where we go to the D, the C, when it goes electric, that you could imagine someone saying, 'That sounds like The Who.' But that doesn't mean we're gonna change it. When you're recording, you don't hire some guy with a dictionary to stand by and say, 'Ah, ah, ah, that sounds like Devo. Stop right now.' I talked to Jimmy Page and I was saying that Led Zeppelin owned the riff. Any band who writes a riff, any riff ever, it gets compared to Led Zeppelin, from Rage Against The Machine and on and on to The White Stripes. It's the same with The Beatles. They own melodic. The Beach Boys own vocal harmonies. There's these bands that did it first and they own it for all eternity."
• The album title comes from an inscription on the southwest corner of Washington DC's main post office composed by American writer and educator Charles William Eliot. The full inscription reads: "Messenger of sympathy and love, servant of parted friends, consoler of the lonely, bond of the scattered family, enlarge of the common life."