Songfacts®:

• This soaring, bittersweet love song was released as the second single from Pearl Jam's 10th studio album, Lightning Bolt. It finds Eddie Vedder crooning:
  
  "I could take your hand and feel your breath.
  Or feel that someday we'll be over."
  
  "I remember when [Vedder] played that for us in his room right after he wrote the lyrics," recalled bassist Jeff Ament. "I think he had stayed up the night before writing."
• Producer Brendan O'Brien, who has worked with Pearl Jam since their 1993 Vs. album, called this emotional ballad, "one of the best songs they've ever written."
• Eddie Vedder talked to Rolling Stone about writing mellower music in his middle age, such as this song. The Pearl Jam frontman said there is more "sentimentality" in his lyrics nowadays, adding, "For years, it was playing word games and expressing those emotions, but doing it in such a way that was cryptic and where Mark Arm from Mudhoney would still have some modicum of respect for me. But nowadays, it's more like sitting down and writing a song, and whatever comes out, comes out."
• The accompanying music video is a performance clip directed by photographer Danny Clinch, who also helmed the visual for "Mind Your Manners."
• The ballad is one of several tracks on Lightning Bolt that reference mortality. Vedder told Rolling Stone the album has a lot of lyrics about the passing of life and ageing because "They say to write what you know. I think that's maybe one thing that we all know [laughs]. It's living while you're alive, and living to the day you die, and being cognizant of the end, and you might lead a more appreciative life, if that's part of your approach."
• Guitarist Mike McCready told Billboard magazine that he wrote the music for the song after a Roger Waters concert for The Wall inspired him. "I wanted to write something that would have a Pink Floyd type feel," he said, "We recorded a demo of it [but Vedder] didn't put the lyrics on it until the second time we went back in... I heard them the night that he put them on there and they just brought me to tears. This is Ed at his best in my mind."