How Thursday's "This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb" came about

October 5, 2017

In a recent interview with Exclaim!, Thursday’s Geoff Rickly talks about his love for commercial jingles and how that—surprisingly—brought about the song “This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb.”

“I remember I made the mistake of telling our A&R guy about my upbringing, how my parents were really into the music of the hippies and stuff and would take me to see shows all the time, but the music that I really loved when I was a kid was commercial jingles; I just loved commercial jingles,” Rickly tells Exclaim!.

He explains that he just couldn’t write commercial jingles because he didn’t have the right product to write a track about, noting that he couldn’t put together anything to the Bach-like genius level that is the Mew Mix commercial. (We all know… the “meow, meow, meow, meow” one…) But what did end up inspiring him? The war in Iraq.

“It was 2003, the U.S. had declared that we were going to go to war in Iraq even though we had no evidence of why we would do that—and I thought, god, I wish I could write a commercial for a bomb because it's like the perfect product; people need it, they always want to blow each other up, but you can't reuse it, so you've got to buy a new one every time, and the market doesn't even set the price; it's federally funded,” Rickly explains.

“Man, this is like the perfect product, and I started jingles for bombs and this is the song that came out of it.”

So that’s how War All The Time’s “This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb” came to be. It may not sound like a typical commercial jingle, but the story behind the song is truly incredible.

Listen to the interview and acoustic performance of the song below: