• Portuguese Translation

Jared Leto talked about the song in an exclusive track-by-track album preview with MusicRadar published on December 2, 2009:

In many ways, a cornerstone for this record. Half of [“Kings and Queens”] was written in America and the other half was written in South Africa, which has proved to be a very lucky and magical place for the band.

I wrote the first verse just as I was headed out the door for South Africa, and the minute I touched down I finished the rest of it. I took that as a good omen.

Musically, it was a bit of a beast in that it was originally eight minutes long, so we had to do some trimming. I decided to change the chord structure of the bridge and just let the pieces fall where they may. Steve Lillywhite really helped out with that, figuring out what made sense.

Jared Leto talked about the music video in an article from MTV, published on October 13, 2009:

Our rule as a band is, when we do videos — which, I don’t often think of them as videos, more as short films — let’s make sure the experience is amazing. We’ve been to China in the past. We’ve been to the Arctic, so really, to do this video, in one way, was much simpler … but it’s also been more of a challenge. It’s still equally huge in its own way.

We’re doing all-night shoots. That was my big, dumb idea, to shoot at night. But I think this city is a beautiful place at night, and we have these empty streets, and it’s kind of a haunting, forgotten landscape … very serene. It’s about reclaiming public spaces.

It’s been an incredible adventure, but it’s also been really difficult, because there are so many people, and we’re shutting down streets of Los Angeles. Downtown, bridges, some tunnels, Hollywood Boulevard, Santa Monica Pier, we’ll be up on Mulholland [Drive], overlooking the city. But the idea, the night rides, I just had some friends that were doing Critical Mass and Crank Mob and People’s Ride in L.A. And it’s that sort of serendipitous thing, where people started talking to me about it in my life, and then my friend got a fixed gear, and then another friend of mine got a fixed gear. I thought the world was really interesting, and I thought it would be a really beautiful backdrop for the video.