Songfacts®:

• Written by the band while they were on tour, Michael Stipe explained in the October 1992 issue of Q magazine: "(It's) about a mother and child, especially the strong bond that exists between them. The voice is neither hers nor the child's, however. It's someone else commenting on the sense that the bond between a mother and child is the most powerful love of all... I think it's significant to state that it's not a song about defenestration.
  
  I took great pains to clarify that in the vocal. There's an event that's occurred somewhere far away that has come to the attention of the woman who's the protagonist of the song, and she realizes how significant that thing is to her child and herself, and she goes to the window to take a breath. I think that when I first wrote the song, it did seem like the woman hurled herself and her child out of the window, but that's not what occurs."
• Producer Scott Litt recalled to Mojo: "I kinda stole the hand claps and finger snaps from 'Under Pressure.' And Michael (Stipe) pulled a kind of John Lennon move, like how Lennon would ask for his vocal to sound like he was on the moon? Michael said he wanted to sound completely detached, like in another place. So we rigged up a Sony Walkman that would record directly to tape. So you get that weird compressed sound, and Michael actually recorded it in a garage at Prince's Paisley Park Studio in Minneapolis, which was where we mixed Out of Time."
  
  "Sometimes when a musician says to you they want something to sound like it's from another place, sometimes the best thing to do is record it in another place."