Songfacts®:

• Ten years after splitting, Take That released this self-penned number as their comeback single. It spent a month at the top of the UK singles charts, was voted The Record of the Year for 2006 by the British public (polling 15.5% of the final vote), and won the Record of the Year award at the 2007 BRIT Awards. It also reached #1 in several European countries, including Germany, Spain and Switzerland.
• Former 98 Degrees lead singer Nick Lachey covered this as the lead single from his 2009 album Coming Up For Air.
• This comeback single gained the former boy band new fans from some of the edgier members of the music industry. For instance, Nicky Wire, the bassist of Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, compared them to Neil Young. He declared: "It's the greatest comeback single in history. If Neil Young had written it, people would be calling it a masterpiece." Wire added: "It's got such a dark lyric: 'My heart is numb, has no feeling/So while I'm still healing/Just try and have a little patience.' There's also a maturity about it that suits the boys all grown-up."
• This song is written from the perspective of someone pleading with their lover to have patience with them while they heal and recover from a previous trauma in their life. It can also be read as Barlow asking Take That fans to have patience with him as he returned to the public eye after shunning the spotlight for several years. Barlow lost a lot of his confidence after Take That originally split in 1996, with his subsequent solo career tanking due to a backlash from the British press.
  
  Barlow later told former BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe that he felt the "stars aligned" when he wrote this song, adding: "I'd had 10 years I could see this song, but I couldn't hear it. And there it was, right in front of me."
• The music video for this song was shot in Iceland and directed by David Mould. It depicts the four members of Take That individually trekking across rugged terrain while dragging their microphones. Eventually, Barlow, Donald, Orange, and Owen meet at the top of a cliff, with the band launching into the triumphant chorus while ocean waves crash behind them.
• "Patience" missed out on being Christmas #1 in the UK after it was knocked off the top spot on Christmas Eve by The X Factor winner Leona Lewis' rendition of "A Moment Like This."
• This song appears on Take That's fourth studio album, Beautiful World. Coming 11 years after Nobody Else, it was the first album to feature Take That's four-member lineup after Robbie Williams quit the band in 1995. Beautiful World became the second best-selling album of 2006 in the UK after being on sale for only one month, massively outperforming Williams' Rudebox, which was released a few weeks earlier.