"I used to know a blissed-out hippie-chick in Baltimore," recalled Byrne in the liner notes of Once in a Lifetime: The Best of Talking Heads. "She once told me that she used to do acid (the drug, not music) and lay down on the field by the Yoo-hoo chocolate soda factory. Flying out of her body, etc etc. It seemed like such a tacky kind of transcendence… but it was real! A new kind of religion being born out of heaps of rusted cars and fast food joints. And this girl was flying above it all, but in it too."

Drummer Chris Frantz said of the song, "It’s a story about a woman who has the power to levitate above the ground and to check out all her neighbors from a kind of bird’s eye view. And the guy who’s writing the song is in love with her and he kinda wishes she would just be more normal and, like, come on back down to the ground [Laughs], but she doesn’t. She goes floating over the backyard and past the buildings and the schools and stuff and is absolutely superior to him in every way."

The song is musically notable for its unusual use of modulation, The overall key of the song is E major, however the bridge to the chorus is in F major. The second bridge back to the verse is in the key of G major (Chords B min to G maj, "She was glad about it...")

It reached number 54 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and number 17 on the British singles chart. The accompanying music video was directed by avant-garde filmmaker Jim Blashfield, who cites the style of Terry Gilliam as one of his major influences.

The song was featured in the 1989 film Look Who's Talking, in the 2005 film Bewitched, and the 2016 film Storks.

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Wikipedia