Michael Stipe told Q Magazine October 2007 about how he struggles with writing original love songs as they've been done to death: "With 'At My Most Beautiful,' which is a full-on love song, I couldn't find the words. They'd all been done a zillion times. And then I found it with this line about eyelashes ("At my most beautiful, I count your eyelashes secretly".) That opened it up for me. I don't think it had been done before."
The original inspiration for this song came to Stipe at a time when he was putting together a book he was working on, 2XIntro: On The Road With Patti Smith. He was driving up and down Santa Monica Boulevard and was consistently late for his appointments. He told Jam!: "I was stuck in traffic, this mid-day traffic, on Santa Monica Boulevard, but I had the tapes, and I was listening to them in the car, and I was trying to come up with stuff. I wrote the line, 'I found a way to make you smile', and I just thought, that's the most beautiful thing in the world."
"Once I had written the piano part, I realized that in some small way I might have been channeling Brian Wilson, so I ran with that in both the bass lines and the harmonies. Our deferential nod to one of the best musicians of all time," Mike Mills noted in Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage.
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