Songfacts®:

• Inspiration for this song came to Robert Smith when he was dealing with his self-doubt, and when reading an article about Rohipnol, which became known as "the date rape drug," but what Robert would take for anxiety when he traveled by plane. Said Smith: "It helped me overcome, not quite a phobia, but I was incredibly loath to get on a plane for seven years. It helped me break through that barrier. I found the outcry that surrounded Rohipnol was a lot of it rubbish basically. The senses that I experienced were not like that. Not that I was ever date raped, but the images that they used were quite powerful, the testimony of the women involved. I used some of that and wove it in with this particular experience, then tried to marry to the idea of what I sometimes perceive as my own decline over the years since Disintegration. I tried to put myself in context to how I felt then and how I feel now."
• A remix of the song plays in the closing credits of the movie American Psycho.
• The album was finished in May of 1999 but wasn't released until February of 2000 because Polydor wanted to it to ride on "post millennial fever." The decision was one of the final straws for the band - who had been with the imprint Fiction Records since they released their debut single, "Killing An Arab" in 1978 - and they decided to leave the label for good.
• At 11:13, "Watching Me Fall" is the longest studio track in The Cure's catalog.