Songfacts®:

• Recorded in New Orleans and written as a post-Katrina prayer, this ballad with a funeral march feel was first performed live on a National Public Radio podcast in 2010. The studio version leaked on to the internet via R.E.M.'s own website at the start of the following year.
• Stipe's lyric for this soulful lament for New Orleans follows on from Accelerate's "Houston," with its Katrina-refugee this time returning home to the Louisiana city. After bemoaning the destruction of his home city, the protagonist focuses more on the overcoming of adversity. "This place needs me here to start/ This place is the beat of my heart," sings Stipe.
• "New Orleans, being the heart and soul of American music, is a city that we've always loved, that has seen more than their fair share of misfortune lately," bassist Mike Mills told The West Australian. "It's a town that could use a little bit of a boost."
• When Peter Buck first heard the demo for this song, he thought of the TV show Deadwood, a historical crime series set in South Dakota. "You know ... drunk guys lying in the mud and the rain. That just somehow felt appropriate," he wrote in the liner notes for Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage.
• Jem Cohen shot the music video in Vienna, Austria, while on location for a feature film. Cohen has also directed the videos for "Belong," "Country Feedback," "Nightswimming," "Talk About the Passion" and "E-Bow the Letter."
• This was featured on the first season of the FX TV series The Bear during a montage that closes out episode three ("Brigade") as Carmy is reminded of his late brother, Michael, whose restaurant he's trying to salvage. The show's creator, Christopher Storer, and executive producer Josh Senior are also the series' music supervisors and they handpicked the tune for the soundtrack. When asked why he chose a lesser-known ballad from R.E.M's final album for the scene, Storer told Uproxx:
  
  "In the back of my mind, I was kind of saying goodbye to my favorite band. This sounds so trivial. But I remember that song was always such a specific thing of R.E.M. to me. That last album sort of just slipped away even though there are some masterworks there. It's almost a mirror of Radiohead's 'Let Down' for me, which is this song that’s impossibly sad, but there's something really hopeful about it. It reminded me a lot of their work on Green."
  Storer also imagined that Michael would be familiar with R.E.M.'s catalog. He continued, "I thought Michael probably listened to R.E.M. Life's Rich Pageant is probably one of those CDs rolling and falling around in the restaurant somewhere."
  
  R.E.M. also collaborated with the showrunners for season 2, releasing a new Bear-themed music video for "Strange Currencies." The song, from their Monster album, is also featured throughout the season.