“A Beautiful Lie” by 30 Seconds to Mars

"A Beautiful Lie" is the title track of 30 Seconds to Mars' second album, released in 2005, and Jared Leto wrote it alone, words and music. Josh Abraham produced it with the band. Picking it as the album's fourth single took some agonizing: the band was torn between it and "The Fantasy", felt both carried a message worth pushing, and checked what the Echelon wanted before announcing the pick on their website in May 2007.

It went to radio that July and drew enough airplay to climb to 37 on America's Modern Rock chart by late 2007, even as the single's release kept sliding toward early 2008, possibly because the video ran late. EMI Japan had said the clip would be filmed in Alaska and at the North Pole; Leto moved it to Greenland and Iceland, and it was shot in Greenland that August.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.