Songfacts®:

• This song's message is about celebrating the pleasant moments during troubled times. No matter how difficult things are, everything's relative, as it's still a "Good Night On Earth."
  
  "I was just sitting on my back porch one night in the thick of the pandemic and all the crazy awful things happening in the world and I just thought 'you know what, if I don't think about all that right now, this is a pretty nice moment, I'm having a nice evening,' Eels mainman Mark Everett told NME. "So I think it's important to acknowledge and hang on to the good moments."
• In the 2003 rom-com Love Actually, Colin Firth's writer character Jamie exclaims: "I can't stand eels!" Everett took the comment to heart and immortalized it in this song's last verse.
  
  Everyone's a critic, I can't stand Eels
  So says Colin Firth
  Rain on my parade, then the clouds fade
  It's a good night on earth
  
  Everett had the idea to reference Firth's comment after a friend sent him a clip of the scene. "I thought, 'That's the opposite of love, actually.' So I put that in the lyrics - one of the unpleasant things about life before appreciating a nice evening," Everett told Billboard. "Let the record reflect that Mr. Firth drew first blood."
  
  Don't worry, Everett isn't really beefing Firth; the lyric is just an example of his quirky humor. The Love Actually actor made the comment while deep in water, trying to retrieve his sodden manuscript. Firth's disdain was for the eels slithering around his legs, not Everett's rock band.
• Steven Mertens directed the song's primarily animated video, which stars Everett as a news anchorman battling an evil lobster kaiju. "Just another newscaster Godzilla fighting a lobster from space video," the musician said.
• Everett recorded the song for Extreme Witchcraft, which he co-produced with PJ Harvey producer and guitarist John Parish. It is the first time the two have worked together since Eels' 2001 Souljacker album. Because they recorded the record during lockdown with Everett based in Los Angeles and Parish in Bristol, England, the time difference created some issues. Everett had to set his alarm for 4 a.m. so he could check what Parish had sent him. He then had to get his part back to the English producer before he went to bed.
• Why Extreme Witchcraft? The album title comes from a news story Everett read about Beyoncé being sued by her former drummer. Among his allegations was that Queen Bey practiced "extreme witchcraft," which the Eels mainman thought hilarious. "I love those two words together," he told The Sun. "As if witchcraft wasn't already extreme enough."