Songfacts®:

• Marianne Faithfull wrote this song with Nick Cave. The pair previously joined forces on the haunting ballad "Late Victorian Holocaust," a track from her 2014 album Give My Love to London.
• Faithfull told Mojo the collaboration with Cave took some wrangling. "It's a little miracle," she said. "I asked him if he would put music to it and he wrote back saying 'I'm so busy.' I said, 'I understand sorry to bother you.' Then he just wrote back, 'Thank you so much for understanding; here's the song.' It's just gorgeous."
• The song is sung by Puck from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Faithfull explained it's about "the Gypsy Faerie Queen who walks the land with her blackthorn staff, wears moleskins and a crown of rowanberries, and is followed by Puck everywhere. She doesn't speak anymore, she sings."
• The song was released as the lead single from Negative Capability. The album's title is a reference to the phrase "negative capability" that was used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 in a letter to his brothers. Faithfull explained: "It's a phrase from a Keats letter that I'd known about for a long time, and I think it's a wonderful, strong thing to call something."
• Marianne Faithfull originally wrote "The Gypsy Faerie Queen" for Cave. "I know that are certain things he won't be interested in, so when I wrote for Nick I had to focus on what might please him" she told Uncut magazine. "He likes things to be quite positive, not too gloomy and he likes things to be a little bit detached."