Songfacts®:

• In this ballad, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James is stuck in a rut and desperate to find his way out. James told Pandora Stories that the song takes him back to a time where he really did feel like he was spinning his wheels:
  
  "I remember very vividly the night I wrote the song 'Spinning My Wheels.' I was very unsatisfied. I really felt stuck. I tried to go to a show to occupy my mind, but I couldn't get into it. So I came back home, sat down at the piano and wrote that song. I just kind of popped out of me. I felt so unsatisfied, like I was stuck spinning my wheels, but I wanted it to have a happy ending. I wanted it to feel like I was done spinning my wheels and finding a new way to live and to be happy. Sometimes I succeed at that and sometimes I don't."
• The Waterfall II was meant to come out shortly after its predecessor in 2015, as all of its songs were already recorded during the prolific sessions in Stinson Beach, California, for the first album. But the band was so burned out from touring that the project was put on the back burner and forgotten - until James felt his wheels spinning again during the COVID-19 pandemic. Once again, it was this ballad that pulled him out of the spiral. While he was listening to music on a nature walk near his home in Louisville, Kentucky, the tune popped up on his playlist and reminded him of the long-forgotten shelved album.
  
  "I just really remembered how much I love that song," he recalled in a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone. "And then I remembered, 'Oh, s--t, we still have whole second half we never have released, and maybe this will be a great way to connect again with our listeners and kind of connect with ourselves as a band again.'"