Songfacts®:

• This is a track from The Performance, Dame Shirley Bassey's first studio album of new songs in two decades. English film composer David Arnold produced the entire set.
• Each track was written by a different songwriter and this song was written by Richard Hawley. Arnold told The Daily Telegraph October 28, 2009 that he was determined to get a wide emotional range on the record. He said: "The thing that interested me most was to expose part of her personality she's more reluctant to show publicly: the gentler, more fractured part which considers her feelings rather than the audience's. I remember playing her Richard Hawley's 'After The Rain' with just a string octet, bass drum and piano. The musicians were playing beautifully and I was sitting beside her as she was singing along quietly. I said, 'If you sing it like this, it could be quite special'. She was unsure, because that's not her comfort zone. It's kind of Shirley laid bare."
• The Vatican listed this as one of the institution's "12 Favorite Songs" as part of their playlist on MySpace Music. The other eleven songs include "Don Giovanni" by Mozart, the Vatican's own "Advocata Nostra," featuring the voice of Pope Benedict XVI, "Uprising" by Muse and surprisingly "Changes" by American rapper Tupac Shakur. The Vatican explained on its official MySpace Music page: "The genres are very different from each other, but all these artists share the aim to reach the heart of good minded people."