“Closer To The Edge” by 30 Seconds to Mars

"Closer to the Edge" belongs to Jared Leto from top to bottom: he wrote the words and the music for This Is War, the third 30 Seconds to Mars album, from 2009, and the song went out as that record's third single in the summer of 2010. The band produced it with Flood, Steve Lillywhite is among the co-producers, and Ryan Williams engineered and mixed it.

Tomo Miličević, then the band's lead guitarist, said they thought of it as their pop song, then admitted it was a trick: listen closely and there's plenty of rock grandeur under the hooks. Leto, he said, was chasing something easy to get into that didn't talk down to the fans. That's the push and pull you hear, a sing-along that swells into an arena-sized shout. Leto also directed the video himself under the alias Bartholomew Cubbins; it premiered on the band's YouTube channel in June 2010.

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