Songfacts®:

• A ballad about marriage, "Oblivions" is about the worries that come with longtime companionship.
  
  It's the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me
  You don't know what you are doing
  Do you think you can carry me over this threshold
  Over and over again into oblivion?
  
  National frontman Matt Berninger wrote the song with his wife Carin Besser. A former fiction editor for The New Yorker, she has often contributed to the band's songwriting.
  
• Beringer explained the song's meaning to Pitchfork: "You don't understand what marriage is until you're way into it: Are you going to be there every time I collapse? Every time I change? This is a funny pop song about that promise you make and what it means to follow through."
• The song is a duet between Berninger and Pauline de Lassus Saint-Geniès, a French singer better known by her stage name Mina Tindle.
• The I am Easy to Find album is accompanied by a short film starring Alicia Vikander that shows the journey of a woman from birth to death. The film's director Mike Mills also co-produced the record. He explained that they had a lot of different singers try "Oblivions," but when The National and him heard Tindle's version, "it was like, Oh, there's the character! You have to find the body and soul who told that story."