Songfacts®:

• This song dates back to the early 2000s. Roger Waters told Uncut:
  
  "I recorded that in Compass Point, Nassau. Back then, it was a song about a cowboy being hanged. It had a weird, stream of consciousness lyric. It talks about this hanging and it finishes up, 'When the rope hit the spot at the end of the drop the last thing he heard was her calling, "Hold on, I'm coming home.'" So it's about his relationship with a woman, in some way.
  
  But on the new record, it's about Obama's drone warfare. The lyrics have been adapted to include the death of a specific Yemeni girl in a cruise missile attack. So the story is new, the ideas are new, but they all fit around the music of the song."
• Roger Waters told Mojo the story behind the song:
  
  "'The Most Beautiful Girl' had a life of its own. I had no idea what it was about, I just sort of liked the metre of some of the lines, and I loved the music, which keeps changing key. I had developed a big attachment to this particular Yemeni girl who's in a documentary called Dirty Wars. I became somewhat obsessed with his girl, so I thought maybe I'll take that song and make it about her, and about her being killed - about the potential relationship between a sailor on a warship and some little girl who's several hundred miles away, who he kills. What that feels like, to everybody involved, and what does it mean, and what's the point of it and why would you do that?"