Songfacts®:

• "Oceans Apart" is the second single from The Coral's 2023 album Sea of Mirrors. The song explores the idea of being "oceans apart" from your loved ones, both physically and emotionally.
• "Oceans Apart" is Sea of Mirrors' closing track. The band recorded the album at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool. They were the last act to record there before the studio was sold.
• Sean O'Hagan of the avant-pop band the High Llamas produced Sea of Mirrors. He previously worked on The Coral's 2010 album Butterfly House.
• Sea Of Mirrors has a country-rock sound filtered through a psychedelic lens. "I think really we're at a stage in our career where the question is, 'what haven't we done?' We haven't done a country album, so we'll do our version," frontman James Skelly told Rolling Stone. "We haven't done a soundtrack, or an orchestral type album, so we'll do that, too. It was more about filling in the gaps in our catalogue, because to be honest."
• The band describe "Oceans Apart" as "The 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Queen would've written if, instead of touring the world, they stayed in watching cinecittà studios films and listening to Gene Clark."
• The actor Cillian Murphy delivers a spoken-word piece towards the end of the song. The Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer star is a fan of the band, and after failing to recruit spaghetti western actors Frank Nero and Terence Hill for the vocal cameo, O'Hagan proposed Murphy for the role.
  
  "Sean was like, 'Oh I know someone. I did his first film. He might be good – Cillian Murphy' and I was like 'What? One of the best actors in the world?'" Skelly told NME. "And then Cillian Murphy just emailed and was like, 'Ah, yeah I love the band, I'm up for helping you out.'"
  
  "Then we just had a conversation about what it was going to be, because we needed help with it," he added. "We were speaking about books we liked and films and how you build a character. He went away and thought about the character and tried different things."
  
  "He just sent what he did for the album and said it should be like an old sort of American actor like Bella Lugosi or Buster Keaton," Skelly continued. "The idea was these massive stars ended up in these B-movies. And they were like, 'Where is my life?' That's the idea, this internal thing of, 'How did I get here?' He just nailed it and we put it in the track and put some reverb on it. We were like 'Nice one Cillian, thanks a lot, you put the cherry on top.'"
• Other times Murphy has dabbled in music include reciting Jehnny Beth's "A Place Above" and starring in the videos for Jehnny Beth's "I'm A Man," Feist's "The Water" and I Break Horses' "Winter Beats."