Songfacts®:

• The title track of Joanna Newsom's Divers album, this is a tale of unrequited love for a person that spends much of their time underwater. It appears the object of Newsom's affections is unaware of her interest as she concludes the song with the lines, "You don't know my name, but I know yours."
• Newsom first performed the song live on June 25, 2012 as part of her concert with Philip Glass and Tim Fain at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco.
• Like Joanna Newsom's other albums, the writing process for Divers began with a song that became the record's guiding principle. She told Mojo: "The first song I wrote was Divers. Then I waited for the other songs."
  
  "The writing process was odd. There was always a sense of half-remembering, like I had dreamt the songs before I wrote them, which I know is a lame cliché, but it's true. I felt like the whole record was hanging in the air shimmering around me, waiting to be collected and assembled. That shimmering wholeness of the idea never left me. I was just trying to get the songs to sound the way I remembered them."
• Newsom stated in an NPR interview that though, "the diving imagery is the most literal in this song, there are incidents of diving in various forms throughout the record: falling, or crashing an airplane, or dive-bombing, or being a bird diving for prey."