Songfacts®:

• "While My Heart Is Still Beating" finds Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry exploring his feeling of emotional disconnect from those around him. Like a number of songs on Avalon, the song is ambiguous but full of passion. Ferry reflected on this to Roxy Music biographer David Buckley. "I felt this was the most romantic, dreamlike album I'd ever done," he said. "It's very much a mood album, and the lyrics kind of appear here and there as little kinds of washes of color. They're very vague, the lyrics on this album; for me in a nice way in a sense that they kind of color the moods."
• Roxy Music saxophonist Andy Mackay composed "While My Heart Is Still Beating" with Ferry. Speaking to The Mail on Sunday on June 28, 2009, Mackay described it as "one of the most beautiful of the songs Bryan and I wrote together, the uncertain shifting chords and sparse percussion letting the voice float cool as glass."
• During the recording sessions for Avalon, Roxy Music gave this song the working title "Epiphany" even though that word doesn't appear in the lyrics.
• Roxy Music considered releasing "While My Heart Is Still Beating" as the third single from Avalon after "More Than This" and the title song. When the upbeat "More Than This" charted higher than "Avalon," however, the band decided to ditch "While My Heart Is Still Beating" for the more danceable "Take A Chance With Me."
  
  Before shelving the single release, Roxy Music made a video for "While My Heart Is Still Beating." The clip, which follows Ferry as he explores a house full of old mannequins, can be seen on YouTube.
• On October 22, 1990, Roxy Music released a live album called Heart Still Beating. The album features a recording of a concert in Fréjus, France, on August 27, 1982, as part of the Avalon tour.
• Bryan Ferry included a jazz version of "While My Heart Is Still Beating" on his 2018 solo album Bitter-Sweet. The Roxy Music frontman was inspired to make the album after working on the Netflix television show Babylon Berlin. Ferry contributed several jazz versions of Roxy Music songs to the German neo-noir series and even made a cameo as a Weimar cabaret singer in "Episode 10."
• American hip-hop supergroup Hail Mary Mallon sampled the piano motif from this song on their viral hit single "4AM." Composed of Rob Sonic, Aesop Rock, and DJ Big Wiz, Hail Mary Mallon released two albums: Are You Gonna Eat That? (2011) and the "4AM"-featuring Bestiary (2014).
• Avalon was Roxy Music's eighth and final album. It was also the band's most commercially successful release, reaching #1 in the UK, Canada, and Australia, and selling over a million copies in the US.
  
  The front cover shows Ferry's girlfriend and future wife, Lucy Helmore, dressed in a medieval helmet and holding a falcon on her wrist. This is an ode to King Arthur's final trip to the mystical land of Avalon. "When King Arthur dies, the Queens ferry him off to Avalon, which is sort of an enchanted island," Ferry noted to NME on June 19, 1982. "It's the ultimate romantic fantasy place."