Songfacts®:

• This is one of those songs that when it comes on, you know if from somewhere but have a hard time placing it. It's from the Jason Bourne movies:
  
  The Bourne Identity (2002)
  The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
  The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
  The Bourne Legacy (2012)
  Jason Bourne (2016)
  
  The song is used as the end title theme in each film.
• When released as a single in 2002, "Extreme Ways" peaked at #39 in the UK. In 2007 it re-entered the UK Top 50 after its use in The Bourne Ultimatum movie.
• Moby told Scotland's Sunday Herald in 2002 that the tune is a romanticized account of debauchery, "the darker, more degenerate side of things and how seductive it is but also how destructive it can be as well." At least, that's where he imagined such a path could lead him. He added: "The song is indicative of perhaps more degeneracy and depravity than I've actually experienced."
  
  His ways were becoming more extreme, though. After his mother's death in 1997, he adopted a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and sex that became easier to fund as his success continued to grow.
  
  Describing himself as an "old-timey alcoholic," he told The Guardian he'd find himself "at 8am, with strangers in my house, bags of drugs, I'd had about 15 drinks, having sex with a complete stranger. Which is great, but that was my best attempt to drink in moderation. Also, I thought I was going on these great adventures, and the truth is I was going from one bar to another on Ludlow Street."
  
  When his addiction culminated in a suicide attempt in 2008, he took steps to get sober.
• Moby found international fame in 1999 with the release of his Play album, a collection of electronic tracks built on vocal samples of old blues and gospel tunes and beats from funk and disco records. He used the same technique for 18, enlisting his friends to help him hunt for records with strong vocals and other interesting elements he could sample.
  
  "I want to have the broadest possible sonic palette to draw on when I'm composing music," he told The New York Times in 2002. "I wasn't exactly looking for '80s hair metal. But I wanted to hear pop records, dance records, classical records."
• This features Moby's own vocals but samples the strings from Hugo Winterhalter's 1971 cover of Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'," and the funky drum beats from Melvin Bliss' "Synthetic Substitution" (1973) and Coke Escovedo's "I Wouldn't Change A Thing" (1976).
• The music video, directed by Wayne Isham, Moby is backed by a band of lookalikes as he performs the tune. Isham, who helmed clips for the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Britney Spears, came up with the concept to emphasize that Moby is a one-man band.
• This plays at the end of The Simpsons episode "Bart Vs. Itchy & Scratchy" (2019).
• Moby's 2019 memoir Then It Fell Apart takes its title from a line in this song:
  
  Then it fell apart, it fell apart
  Oh baby, oh baby
  Like it always does, always does