Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of The Waterfall, My Morning Jacket's seventh album. The band performed the songs off the record at Los Angeles' Mack Sennett Studios for the first time live. Frontman Jim James said, following this tune's rendition: "We built that song as a matrix for people to get lost in. We built it as a disorienting experience, but hopefully a very pleasurable one."
• Jim James explained to Mojo why he used a waterfall as a metaphor for the journey of life on this track. "Remixed the record in Portland, Oregon, with Tucker Martine," he explained. "And there's a scenic drive out there where you pass lots of waterfalls. Whenever I stand in front of a waterfall, I try to pause it in my mind, then rewind it and make it go backwards. Obviously you can't do that."
  
  "I felt really overwhelmed by life lately, like there's this waterfall with constant activity, constant demands, constant stuff... And it's just like you want to pause it," James continued. "But you can't, so you somehow have to get into a flow, and go with it, try to live the best you can."
• The settings of where My Morning Jacket write and records their songs have been integral to the feel of their albums, with farmlands, mountains, rickety old churches and big city studios bringing a different energy. They recorded most of The Waterfall at Panoramic House, a hilltop mansion in Stinson Beach, California, where the band also rented two houses with an ocean view.
  
  "We try to switch it up every time we make a record," James told Uncut magazine in 2015. "Do it somewhere different, and get the vibe of the place into the record. Stinson Beach was like living on another planet. I felt like it was on the moon. Everything is so grand, you feel like you're jutting out into space. There are giant redwood trees, you're right next to the ocean, you can climb up to the top of a mountain and watch the sunset on the beach. Every day we were really impacted by the power of the air, it felt special to us. We spent two months there - living, playing and recording. There was no rush, no pressure to complete it. It was real free and fun."
• James pieced together existing fragments of ideas to create this track, which combines folk and space-rock with pulsating synth lines and '70s-style soft-rock harmonies.
  
  "I knew it should all go together, but I didn't know how," he told Paste Magazine in 2015. "I was obsessed with this idea of a song being built from unrelated elements that become related. The different pieces of the song I wrote at different times, but they told me they should be connected. I had this idea that a song doesn't always have to be this thing you sit down and write with verses and choruses. We're at the crossroads of the world where we can still record live performances on tape, but you can take those performances and put them in the computer and do new things with them that you could never do on tape."