Songfacts®:

• "From Her To Eternity" would be merely a song about romantic infatuation if not for its final lines transforming it into something deeper.
  
  Like most Nick Cave songs, it tells a story. In it, the Australian songwriter, 27 years old at the time, talks about a woman living in the apartment above him. She's a tortured soul that paces around at night crying down through the floorboards and onto Cave's face. Cave lives a similarly sad life ("Outta her nightmare, And back into mine"). He presses his ear to the ceiling to listen to her and sneaks in through her window to steal pages from her diary. Love has turned him into a stalker, but the story doesn't end there. "From Her To Eternity" turns more philosophical with its final lines:
  
  But I know, that to possess her
  Is, therefore, not to desire her
  
  O o o then ya know
  That lil girl would just have to go!
  Go! Go!
  From her to eternity!
  
  Cave is acknowledging the hopelessness of his contradictory nature in seeing that he wants the woman because he can't have her. Once he won her affections, he'd be just as mad to escape the situation. So he's stuck between wanting to possess and wanting to be free, just like most of us - even if we (hopefully) don't quite get to such stalker levels of obsession.
• Anita Lane wrote the lyrics with Cave. Cave's romantic partner from 1977 to 1983, Lane also wrote lyrics for his first band, The Birthday Party (best remembered for "Release The Bats"). Cave wrote the music with Bad Seeds Mick Harvey (who'd also been in The Birthday Party), Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld, and Hugo Race. They recorded at Trident Studios in London in March 1984 with the producer known as Flood, aka Mark Ellis, known for his work with U2, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, and many others.
• "From Her to Eternity" is the title track of the debut album by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
• The title is a play on From Here to Eternity, the title of James Jones' 1951 debut novel. The book tells a fictionalized version of the author's experiences in the US Army in the months leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. The book was adapted to film in 1953 and bears no resemblance to this song. Its follow-up novel, The Thin Red Line, is recognizable to people today because of the 1998 film adaptation starring Sean Penn. Jones took the term "from here to Eternity" from the "Whiffenpoof Song" sung by juniors at Yale University.