Songfacts®:

• Bass player Simon Jones told the New Musical Express January 19 2008 that this track had a "string line looping around three chords all the way through-kind of like 'Bittersweet Symphony' did, although it's not really anything like that."
• IFrontman Richard Ashcroft explained the song in an interview with BBC DJ Steve Lamacq: "Rather Be is something I wrote at home not that many months before we ended up in the studio with Verve actually and just thought it might be an anthemic tune that they'd enjoy playing and it seems that we did. I suppose, you know, lyrically in a way it's kind of we're bombarded with so much information now. There's too much. You know, there's a point where you have to just switch off, because I don't believe we are sort of wired to be able to take in so much information, we become even numb to it or it makes us very, very fearful of the world outside the door when you've got the rolling news going, you've got all this death and destruction and yet on the other hand, even what it's saying is I'd rather be here, you know, it's, I've said it before, 'We're on a rock in infinity. We're on this planet, man.' It's just, isn't that the miracle? Is this the miracle, the miracle?' Is waking up and looking out? It's very difficult, I think, in the modern age to find time to, or space, to really invest a bit of thought into the fact that you are on a planet in infinity."
• In the same Steve Lamacq interview guitarist Nick McCabe added: "That song, Rather Be, could probably be taken maybe loads of different ways. The original version of it was like quite psychedelic and quite a lot of headswirl and background loops and sort of messed with your head a little bit but there was a dilemma really that did we take it in the sort of sixties soul vein. There's like a sort of element of maybe, I don't know, Booker T underneath there and, something that I'd like to sort of re-visit a few times actually that. The original version for me is probably my favourite but I think for clarity's sake we ended up going with the song bit. I mean my sort of passion is for things that don't sound quite right really, you know. (Laughter)."