Frontman Richard Ashcroft told the story of the song in an interview with BBC DJ Steve Lamacq: "I kind of get blasted with a lot of classical stuff when I go to my wife's parents' house and that's seeped in I think to some of those chords. 'Houses,' I suppose in the choruses it's kind of a conversation with myself or somebody else who's going on the reincarnation tip, but you're kind of wondering how many lives these people are going to waste or, you know, it's kind of like a man daydreaming, looking out of his window, looking down at the police tape and the floral tributes in the funeral procession and the same cycle which is played out on the streets of London, certain inner cities round this country, you know, seemingly, at quite an alarming rate at the moment and I kind of wanted to create that atmosphere really with that song and I think the lads did well in creating that sort of, I don't want to say 'sonic landscape', but I have. (laughter)."

Guitarist Nick McCabe told Steve Lamacq: "The drum machine that I insisted putting on that everybody told me sounded like Phil Collins, but I had to battle for that. Yeah, that was sort of three chords. Richard sat at the electric piano and then half an hour later we got a song really, you know, a journey where you've got peaks and troughs and it's 'Is there a song in here?' and then re-visiting and sort of refining, finessing things. That's not actually knowing the content of the song I found myself playing the guitar with a knife at one point and it's some kind of weird connection there, I think, the contents of it, you know. I couldn't really hear the lyrics. I do the one headphone on, one off, so generally I can hear impressions of what everybody else is doing without the full picture."