Matt Berninger in an interview with BBC Radio 6 Music:

I remember there was the chorus, there was a book by Sean Wilsey called “Oh the Glory of It All” – I stole the whole title of that. It was on the shelf in Carin’s library where she keeps all her books. “Light Years” by James Salter was also on the shelf and somehow the chorus of that just got pieced together from those two titles. The rest of it is all about just feeling distant from somebody on a different orbit – people who love each other but don’t understand each other."

Aaron Dessner in an interview with Pitchfork:

That song was connected to grief. I wrote the music after my wife’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer. She was in a very swift decline, so we moved to Denmark [to be with her]. There was this beautiful old Swedish piano in the house we rented where I wrote this and “Carin at the Liquor Store” [from Sleep Well Beast]. I sent it to Matt, and it was one of those ones that just clicked. He sent the song back a day later."

Matt Berninger in an interview with Pitchfork:

Aaron writes stuff, and a lot of it can be academic, but sometimes it comes purely from an emotional place. With “Light Years,” you can tell whatever’s on that piano is 100 percent pure liquid emotion. When I get one of those, it’s easy to go into that same water."