Songfacts®:

• In early September 2015 there was a horrifying airshow disaster ten miles from Nick Cave's home city of Brighton. A vintage aircraft that had taken off at Shoreham airport crashed into a field near the River Adur and killed 11 people.
  
  You fell from the sky
  Crash landed in a field
  Near the river Adur
  
  A month and a half previously, Nick Cave experienced his own horrific tragedy when his 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff and died from his injuries.
  
  You cried beneath the dripping trees
  Ghost song lodged in the throat of a mermaid
  
  Cave's pain is etched in this haunting, sparse work, which splices eerie imagery of grieving loved ones.
• The song was actually one of the first from Skeleton Tree to be written, around late 2014. In Andrew Dominik's documentary One More Time with Feeling, Cave mentions ad-libbing and improvising the anguished prayer to a dead child from a grieving father. Presumably he picked up the idea of the air crash and added the first verse, linking it to the rest of this panorama of grief.
• The music video contains footage taken from the 3D black and white movie, One More Time with Feeling, which documents the recording of Skeleton Tree.