Songfacts®:

• "Such Great Heights" is a Hallmark-grade romantic song that Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard wrote about a girl he was dating. It's intensely poetic, starting with the opening lines:
  
  I am thinking it's a sign
  That the freckles in our eyes are mirror images
  And when we kiss they're perfectly aligned
  
  "At the time I was seeing this woman who I had had a crush on for like a very long time, for like years," he told Life Of The Record. "One of those people that you would see them around town or you would be out and about and we were friends, there was nothing going on at the time, but somebody I'd always pined for secretly. And we started dating and I became just mushy. It allowed me to write something as mushy as 'Such Great Heights.'"
  
  Unfortunately, that flame burned out fast. "It became very clear pretty quickly that we were not compatible," he added.
• This was the first single from The Postal Service, the short-lived duo of Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, who worked together from far away, sending CDs of their music and vocals back and forth until their Give Up album was completed. Gibbard was already well known as the frontman in Death Cab For Cutie; Tamborello, who made the beats and did the production, recorded under the name Dntel.
  
  Signed to the legendary indie label Sub Pop, they thought maybe a handful of electronic music fans would hear the album, but thanks to the internet, word spread and the songs kind of permeated into the culture. They toured in 2003 but didn't tour again until 2013, and they never made another album. Sub Pop was still releasing singles from the album in 2005, including the oddly apocalyptic "We Will Become Silhouettes." It's the second-most-popular album in the label's history, following Nirvana's Bleach.
• Chvrches covered "Such Great Heights" for the 2026 third season finale of the Hulu psychological drama Tell Me Lies.
  
  "The fact the college sections are set in 2008 and 2009 feels poignant to me. I was at university at that time too, and there was no dialogue around 'toxic' relationships in the way there is now," explained Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry to Billboard. "I was thinking about that and trying to bring that personal experience to my delivery when we recorded. I always liked the balance of joy and melancholy in the Postal Service's music."
• The B-side of the single is a cover version by Iron & Wine, who is the singer/songwriter Samuel Beam. The Iron & Wine version got a great deal of exposure, appearing in movie Garden State and in commercials for M&M's and Ask.com. The Postal Service version appears in episodes of Grey's Anatomy and Veronica Mars, and was used in commercials for Target and Kaiser Permanente. It was also used in commercials for the package delivery company UPS, ironic as they are a competitor to the United States Postal Service.
• This is the kind of song you can imagine Jess from the TV series New Girl listening to and falling for the guy who wrote it, while her (male) roommates are horrified. Well, in 2009 Ben Gibbard married Zooey Deschanel, who played Jess. They got divorced a few years later.
• The Seattle-based Jen Wood is the backup singer on this track - she's also Gibbard's duet partner on the song "Nothing Better."
  
  They dated for a while, but it's not clear if "Such Great Heights" is about her.