Songfacts®:

• Paul McCartney was prompted to write this song about global warming denials when he was in Japan and picked up a newspaper. He told The Sun his attention was drawn to an article about people not doing anything about climate change. The gist of it was because the icebergs melting are far away and not in London, everything's going to be fine. Macca added that one phrase in the article particularly caught his attention: "Despite repeated warnings, they're not listening."
  
  McCartney came up with the idea of writing symbolically about a mad sea captain "steering us towards the icebergs" despite being warned it's dangerous. The captain is "symbolic of politicians who argue that climate change is a hoax."
• When McCartney was asked by the BBC whether he's taking aim at anybody in particular on this song, he replied that "obviously" he had Donald Trump in mind after the President had announced plans for the US to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. McCartney added he's not singling out Trump. "There's plenty of them about. He's not the only one."
• This is one of Paul McCartney's epic extended songs in a similar vein to "Band On The Run" and "Live And Let Die." Greg Kurstin, the man behind hits by Kelly Clarkson ("What Doesn't Kill You (Stronger)" and Adele ("Hello") produced the track. He told Rolling Stone that McCartney initially rehearsed the song with the band and worked out its structure of it before bringing it to him in L.A. He then worked with them and together they tweaked it and worked out the arrangement. Kurstin added:
  
  "It was a long evolution to get it to where it got in the end. A lot of orchestral musicians came in. We had brass players and the Muscle Shoals horn guys came in to do some brass stuff. It was quite the job of getting that together because it was like five or six songs in one. It's about seven minutes long."