Songfacts®:

• Browne explained to American Songwriter magazine why this song of seeking and revelation was ambiguous: "I think ambiguity is one of the great treasures I've come upon late in life. [With 'The Arms of Night'] we wrote it in a key too high, and it took forever to figure out how to play it. It's magic. It's mysterious how a particular change will bring stuff out of you, and you'll begin saying stuff... and you won't know where it's going or what you're trying to say. It'd be so much easier if you knew what you wanted to write about and where you wanted to arrive, but it just doesn't happen to work that way for me. It's more like an oracle. The things that come out of your subconscious are much more capable of conveying the truth of the situation than what you're consciously able to summon. It was a challenge to try to figure out who I was talking to, because it's one of those cases where I do a lot of talking to you, but I'm really talking to myself about myself. I like the ambiguity of the song…I'm either talking to someone who has betrayed me, or I'm talking to myself about having betrayed myself. It's sort of left open, and I meant to leave it ambiguous."