Songfacts®:

• "Times of Difficulty" is the closing track from Matt Berninger's second solo album, Get Sunk. The song is the culmination of a record Berninger created after emerging from a period of writer's block and depression. He recorded it primarily in Connecticut after his move from Los Angeles.
  
  "Times of Difficulty" serves as Berninger's thesis statement for the album: when life collapses into chaos, what matters most is the reciprocity of human connection.
• I'll think of you if you think of me
  The way the sky thinks of the sea
  
  The sky-and-sea metaphor is classic Berninger: people who love each other but only meet in strange atmospheric ways. He came up with the line while cycling along the coast on the way to Manhattan Beach. "That song's about people who love each other who just cannot connect," Berninger told Uncut magazine. "So the sky and the sea, they never touch. But they do touch - in the mist, in the waves, they're touching all the time. They're the same. The rain, the water, the sky or the sea, what's the difference? I think a lot of times we are like that. We think we're so different when we're literally the same thing, right next to each other. We are touching."
• Produced by Sean O'Brien, who has been Berninger's closest collaborator since his first solo album, Serpentine Prison, the track leans into lighter, airier textures, a step away from the dusky density of his The National work.
• The organ, keyboards and vocal harmonies are courtesy of Booker T. Jones - yes, the Booker T Jones, who was instrumental in defining the sound of Stax Records with Booker T. & the M.G.'s back in the '60s. The legendary musician was Berninger's producer on Serpentine Prison.
• Berninger co-wrote the song with Mike Brewer, a longtime friend whose fingerprints are all over Berninger's solo output. Brewer's indie project, Nancy, never gained mainstream traction, but his musical partnership with Berninger has become a quiet constant, like the sea to Berninger's sky.