Songfacts®:

• In the album's liner notes, the sampled vocals are credited to The Shining Light Gospel Choir, supposedly taken from a recording originally made by them in the 1950s. The true source, however, is a 1963 recording of the gospel tune "He'll Roll Your Burdens Away" by The Banks Brothers & The Back Home Choir. As Moby told The New York Times, he manipulated the original vocal, "Why does my heart feel so glad," to fit the context of his melancholy tune.
  
  Moby sampled The Banks Brothers again on a track on his 2002 18 album, "In My Heart," and once again attributed the sample to The Shining Light Gospel Choir. It's uncertain why he didn't credit the correct group.
• When Play first came out, the reviews were mainly negative. LA Weekly, for instance, scoffed: "There's a song on this album which asks Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? and the reason is because I'm listening to this album."
  
  Play only began to sell when it started being played in clothing shops and appearing on adverts.
• The New York Times March 17, 2002 asked Moby what drew him to vintage recordings. He replied: ''With older recordings, most of which were simply recordings of live performances, you get the quality of the room it was recorded in, this ghostly kind of presence, which I like. Also, you can take a source vocal that's very neutral and by changing the chord progression underneath it make it take on a whole other character. You know the song on Play 'Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?' The song I took the woman's vocal from actually goes 'glad,' not 'bad' - it's an upbeat, happy song. But me being me, I guess, I put these minor chords under it and manipulated the vocal, and it became something else.''
• Moby told Rolling Stone that this was written in 1992 "as a really bad techno song. Just mediocre, generic techno." He added: "At some point I rediscovered the song and I tried doing it considerably slower, tried to make it mournful and romantic." Moby went on to say that his manager, Eric talked him into including this song on Play.
• This song reached #3 in the German single charts, before sales of Play began to take off. Moby said to Rolling Stone that this song, "for some reason struck a nerve in Germany and became a big hit single over there. I thought that was as far as any success for Play was gonna go."
• Moby re-recorded the song with vocalists Apollo Jane and Deitrick Haddon for his 2021 Reprise album. The record finds the musician and the Budapest Art Orchestra re-imagining some of his classic songs with new arrangements for orchestra and acoustic instruments.
• British illustrator and animator Steve Cutts created the entirely hand-drawn animated video for the Reprise version featuring Moby's alter ego, Little Idiot, the star of the original 1999 visual. The clip highlights issues that have long been close to the artist's heart: animal rights, environmental protection and climate change. Coutts previously animated the videos for 2016's "Are You Lost in the World Like Me?" (2016) and "In This Cold Place" (2017).
• This was used on the TV series Cold Case in the 2005 episode "Saving Patrick Bubley." It was also featured in the movies Millennium Mambo (2001), Lovely Rita (2001), and The Next Best Thing (2000).
• Moby told Vinyl Me Please in 2017 how he used samples on the album to convey the theme of loneliness, saying: "I was trying to capture the quality of two lonely people reaching out to each other, or a lonely voice reaching out to a person who's listening. I never wanted to create a record that made somebody feel more lonely, like the voice is pulling away."