Songfacts®:

• Leonard Cohen digs out his acoustic guitar for this country-folk ballad. It is one of three tracks on Old Ideas to feature his finger picking.
• The song is an ode to a fading love. "I'm old and the mirrors don't lie," Cohen croons. The 77-year-old songwriter-poet penned the tune with Anhani Thomas, who has been his long-term girlfriend keyboardist and backup vocalist. She originally recorded it the tune on her 2006 album Blue Alert. Cohen explained during a press preview of Old Ideas in London (as reported by The Sun): "It's quite a different treatment but I always loved that song and I asked her to reduce it to guitar chords that I could master. Her piano is so much more subtle and the chords are so much more sophisticated than the ones I could finger on my guitar. So she reduced it to chords that she knew I could play. We rehearsed it for a while and then did it in one take."