Songfacts®:

• Cave wrote this piano-based love song, cloaked in religious imagery, while in rehab. He explained to Mojo magazine March 2009: "In the first couple of days when you haven't slept, you're withdrawing from drugs, you're sick. You try and make the best of a bad situation."
• Nick Cave performed this at the 1997 funeral of his friend Michael Hutchence. He requested that the TV cameras be shut off for his performance out of respect for the late INXS vocalist.
• The Who singer Roger Daltrey covered the song for his 2018 solo album As Long As I Have You. Daltrey told The Sun:
  
  "I love Cave, one of the most amazing songwriters of today, and I like his version but I don't think he sang it as a singer. He keeps a dark side to the song which is great for Nick Cave but I heard something different in it."
• The tortured love song has featured in several films including Zero Effect (1998), On the Beach (2000) Gettin' Square (2003) and About Time (2013).
• In his 2022 book Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave explained that rehab patients were allowed to attend church on Sundays if they wished. One day, while walking back to the facility from church through the fields, the melody for "Into My Arms" came to him. Once he reached the facility, Cave sat down at the piano and composed the melody and chords. Later, he sat on his bed in the dormitory and wrote the lyrics.
  
  While penning "Into My Arms," he encountered a troubled drug addict covered in sores who was spraying himself with Lynx deodorant "as if that was going to change anything." When the addict asked Cave what he was doing, he said he was writing a song. The addict questioned why, to which Cave did not have an immediate answer.
• On his Red Hand Files blog, in which he answers fan mail, Cave responded to a remark about a Montreal, Canada, performance of "Into My Arms." He wrote, "Lonny, when the crowd joins me in singing 'Into My Arms,' it feels like a mutual embrace, an act of conciliation, of comfort, and fellowship – an acknowledgement of our common fate, that we are, in that moment, both living and dying in concert – and it's hard to keep my f--king s--t together, to be honest."