Songfacts®:

• Brighton Port Authority is an alias of English DJ/musician Norman Cook, who has also recorded under the names of Beats International, Freak Power, Fatboy Slim and under his own name as a member of the Housemartins.
• The I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat album was complied by Cook and longtime engineer Simon Thornton from tapes recorded with various musicians dating back to the mid 1990s. Cook described the project to Billboard magazine as "sort of hanging out with people" at his home in Brighton.
  
  "Because I've got a studio next door to my house, people would come visit, get drunk and say 'Let's go and do a tune!' Then we'd get so drunk we'd forgotten we did it until we found the tapes later. I suppose it was me not wanting to be Fatboy Slim, wanting to kind of get away from mindless dance music and try something with real musicians. Most of what I do in dance music is not really songwriting; I remember my wife saying, 'When are you going to write a song about me?' and I don't really write songs in the traditional sense. I found out working with real musicians is more complicated than working with computers - but a lot more fun."
• This song is a collaboration with Martha Wainwright. Cook admitted to Rolling Stone that he couldn't recall doing the recording with the American singer-songwriter: "The track we did with Martha Wainwright. I'm like, 'We did a track with Martha Wainwright?' Some of it we couldn't actually identify who the artist was... The most difficult bit was just wading through hours and hours of absolute b--locks. We had to listen to an awful lot of rubbish. It's literally two and half weeks of tape."