Songfacts®:

• Themes in this song include regret ("Now that I'm poor and aging...") and how education will not get you everywhere (She can read, she can read, oh she's "bad"). In a radio interview, the band said they wrote the song after they saw a news report about the recent death of a model.
• The word "obstacle" doesn't appear in this song or another track on the album, "Obstacle 2." Interpol don't think the titles of songs are important, so they put little thought into them. Lead singer and guitarist, Paul Banks, revealed to Pitchfork in 2003 why the songs are named that way. "I've just never really been all that interested in titles, so either I'm very inspired, or it's just, whatever, the working title," he said. "'Obstacle' 1 and 2 actually came from Daniel, he was working on those. I came up with those names, and they were just our working titles, and everyone was like, 'Those are great names.' We wrote 'Obstacle 2' first and 'Obstacle 1' second, and I do think it was relating to the fact that, for some reason we'd had a drought in our writing. We kind of had a down phase. We just hadn't written anything good in a couple of months, and all of a sudden we were pumping out songs. So it was sort of related to that."
• The song is featured in the video game, Guitar Hero World Tour.