"Mountains" was a major breakthrough in the writing process for our new album The Code Duello. We had just met our manager, Michael Caplan, and had played him four songs we had previously recorded for the record but he obviously wanted to hear where everything else was going. Jack and I locked ourselves in our dad's garage and began fine tuning some ideas, with most of the music for what would become "Mountains" being one of them. We felt kind of bored with the state of rock at the time, so I loved writing something huge like this. Jack and I fine-tuned the music and sent it to Michael. His exact text to me after hearing it: "Don't you DARE f*** this up!"

As such, now Jack and I felt some pressure on the vocal side and really started digging into the melodies, trying to make it as grandiose and catchy as we could. We knew we needed something huge in the chorus to match the scope of the music�since this was all of a sudden now being groomed for being a single, we had to really get in the zone.

When it came to the lyrics, however, I was stumped. Like, completely stumped. The time kept ticking by, with the date for recording quickly approaching and I had nothing. Finally, just a few days before recording, I did something I had almost never done before: I wrote a poem. I was listening to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins (not out of the ordinary for me) and I thought, "what would Billy do?" so I just started writing. I wrote about a page's worth of stuff... Music is my life. It's both our lives. We have come this far and felt we had hit a tipping point: we could call it quits, or go all in. And I realized in asking myself the question of which path to take, the answer was simple. I have no other choice. I am going to be a career musician, and I am going to be successful. With this song, I thought let's really go all in and make the biggest statement possible: the one where we tell the world that this is who we are, and we are not changing. I picked out some lines from what I wrote and created lyrics that fit the melodies. Michael made some notes, Jack and I re-jiggered a few lines and "Mountains" was born.

When it came time for the video, we found ourselves in an interesting position, given that Jack and I are really the only two "official" members of the band. Do we put the live guys in the video? Do we do it White Stripes-style? Ultimately, we decided rather than use anyone else, we would just have two versions of ourselves and mess with the viewer a little bit. We shot the whole thing on a green screen and decided that when we got out of the car and opened the door, we were entering some kind of all-white oasis/alternate universe where this was a normal thing. It was a blast.