Songfacts®:

• This song describes a relationship that has grown emotionally distant:
  
  Every time that I touch you
  You feel so far away
  
  Stabbing Westward lead singer Christopher Hall, who wrote the lyric, explained to Songfacts: "That's a song where you're in it and you're looking across at your partner and realizing they're still there – on the surface nothing has changed – but you can't seem to actually reach out and touch them anymore. Some wall has been built between you and you can't figure out how to bridge that wall. I think that's something a lot of married people with kids can definitely associate with."
• This was the lead single from the self-titled 2001 Stabbing Westward album, which was released on the independent label Koch Records because the band was dropped from Columbia following their 1998 album Darkest Days. By this time, the industrial sound was on the wane, and although "So Far Away" got decent airplay, the band split up in 2002. Founding members Christopher Hall and Walter Flakus re-convened from time to time in the '10s, and started releasing music again as Stabbing Westward in 2019.
• The music video was directed by Shawn Foster, whose credits include Sugarcult's "Action" and the promotional film for Deftones' White Pony album. The video opens with a girl saying, "Even when you're not on top of me, I can't breathe." As the band performs the song, she stands just of out reach, separated by an invisible barrier.