Songfacts®:

• Leonard Cohen said during a playback for Popular Problems that ideas for some of the tracks had been kicking around for many years. He began this song shortly after 9/11.
• The song was featured as a poem in the March 2, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.
• Speaking with Speakeasy, Cohen explained the album title acts as "a general description of what we're all up against." He added: "Those are the questions: Life, death, war, peace, space, God. All those matter and rather facetiously, I describe them as 'popular problems.'"
• The song conjures up the fallout from a divided world. "When I say 'the party's over but I've landed on my feet. I'm standing on this corner where there used to be a street,' I think that's probably the theme of the whole album," Cohen told The Daily Telegraph. "Yeah, the scene is blown up, but you just can't keep lamenting the fact. There is another position. You have to stand in that place where there used to be a street and conduct yourself as if there still is a street."