Songfacts®:

• A Roxy Music opus, this song finds Bryan Ferry giving up his party lifestyle for a more settled, meaningful existence with a woman he calls "Mother Of Pearl." Originally consisting of 30 verses, Ferry named it his best song in an interview with Vulture on August 16, 2022, saying:
  
  "'Mother Of Pearl' always comes up as a favorite for me, because it's very wordy and I feel that it has very interesting lyrics. It's emotional, and yet it jumps around from one structure to another, which I like. It was on the third album, Stranded, and I felt I was on a bit of a roll with my writing at that point. Yeah, it's the only song I didn't write on the keyboard. I took a bass guitar away with me for a couple of weeks to do some writing. I had a small keyboard and a cassette, and I recorded it. I wrote the song out in Greece, and my friend Simon Puxley was with me, who was Roxy's press agent in the early days. He wrote the sleeve notes on the first Roxy album [Roxy Music, 1972]. It's one of those songs where I felt I got it right for myself."
• This song paraphrases "As Time Goes By" by Arthur "Dooley" Wilson:
  
  It's the same old story
  All love and glory
  
  Written by Herman Hupfeld, "As Time Goes By" grew in popularity after Wilson performed it as Sam in the 1942 film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart. Ferry previously paid tribute to Bogart on the Roxy Music cut "2HB," and during the Stranded era, he frequently dressed in a cream tuxedo on stage similar to the one seen on the Old Hollywood actor in Casablanca.
• Despite clocking in at almost seven minutes and going in several stylistic directions, Ferry managed to record his vocals for this song in one take. Speaking to Classic Pop on November 8, 2022, Ferry recalled: "I remember Chris Thomas [producer] recording my vocal in AIR Studios when I got back to London. I managed to do it in one take and when I came back into the control room, Chris was lying on the floor, which was his way of saying he liked it."
• Ferry recorded a smooth pop version of "Mother of Pearl" in the early '90s. It was supposed to appear in the 1992 film Basic Instinct, directed by Paul Verhoeven, but ended up not getting released until 2000 when it featured in the film Ordinary Decent Criminal. The Stranded version of "Mother Of Pearl," meanwhile, appears in the 1998 film SLC Punk! and in the 2006 episode "Milk" of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.
• While "Mother of Pearl" was performed on most of Roxy Music's tours until 1979, Ferry told Vulture in 2022 that he rarely performs it live now "because it's such a long song."
• Shot by Karl Stoecker, the photograph on the front cover of Stranded depicts British model Marilyn Cole lying in the jungle. Ferry picked Cole after she was voted Playboy Playmate Of The Year in 1972 and 1973. Cole discussed the image with The Sunday Times on November 11, 2007:
  
  "I'm very pleased and honored to have been a Roxy girl, because I know the aesthetic values of those album covers. At the same time, I look at that picture and I think, 'Why the hell did they choose that shot where my arm's up and the dress is cutting into my armpit?' I think Bryan said at the time that they chose that shot because my eyebrow had turned blue in the light. I thought, 'Ooh, how strange.' But the overall feeling of that cover is very beautiful."