Songfacts®:

• Weller wrote this gospel-tinged track with the idea that humans are like "broken stones" trying to become whole again. He was inspired by a conversation he had with his young son at the beach.
  
  "He was asking me where all the pebbles came from," Weller told Daniel Rachel (The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters). "I told him we were all part of one rock before and we all got smashed down in time and splintered and sent around the earth. I don't know if that's true or not, scientifically, but that was my explanation to him anyway. But even if it wasn't true, as a metaphor for us as a human race, human spirit, that we all come from one source and we just got splintered and sent round the world, there was sense of spirituality that we're all seeking to get back to that core again or get back home. So that spiritual element I married to the gospel accordion chords in it. It's like an old gospel or spiritual tune to me."