Songfacts®:

• "Song for Shelter" by English dance music legend Fatboy Slim was released as a double A-side single with "Ya Mama" on September 3, 2001. Both tracks are featured on his 2000 album Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars, with the single reaching #30 in the UK.
  
  The song serves as an ode to house music and club culture as a whole. In a 2000 interview with Revolver, Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, said: "'Song for Shelter' says: 'This is why we love clubs, this is why we love house music, for all my dalliances with pop stardom.'"
• The song features an evangelical speech taken from American DJ Roland Clark's track "I Get Deep." A specific line from the same song, "They know what is what, but they don't know what is what, they just strut. What the f--k?" is also sampled in another track by Fatboy Slim, "Star 69." This line was later sampled by Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj in their 2017 song "Swish Swish."
• "Song for Shelter" is the final track on Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars and lasts over 11 minutes. The last two and a half minutes of the track repeat the line "Under the big bright yellow sun" over and over. This section is a reprise of the album's opening track, "Talking Bout My Baby," which itself samples "Macon Hambone Blues" by the American southern rock band Wet Willie.
• British electronic music duo Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, aka The Chemical Brothers, remixed "Song for Shelter" for the CD2 single release. In a 2001 interview with SPIN, Fatboy Slim's friend Simons expressed his admiration for the track and Cook in general, stating: "It's my favorite song on the record. I've always been a sucker for a good speech. House music saved Norman's life, and that song is him saying 'thank you' for that."
  
  Simons continued: "That's the aim of electronic music, to give the machines soul. Norman's record totally expresses where he is right now, with this incredible domestic life. I envy what he's got, really."
• "Song For Shelter" was featured in the haunting final scene of the 2001 crime drama film Bully, directed by Larry Clark. The movie is based on a true story and follows a group of teenagers in Florida who conspire to murder their bully after enduring years of abuse.