Songfacts®:

• This song is about moving out of a house that is pumped full of bad memories. Nick Lowe told The Huffington Post that it is not autobiographical in any way: "One day driving along, I saw that written up, 'House for sale.' It's a phrase you see everywhere, all the time - not particularly because of the times we're living in at the moment, but just in ordinary day-to-day living, you see that phrase. One day, it just struck me that it had some melody to it, and I thought that it could be fun to hang a little song around it. It's a very straightforward song without any hidden meaning in it, and it's certainly not autobiographical. I don't really do too much autobiographical stuff. I know what I'm writing about, but I don't put my diary to music, if you know what I'm talking about."
• Elsewhere asked Lowe if this song was inspired by the old music standard, "A Cottage For Sale." Lowe denied this at first, but upon reflection, realized they could be right: "No, I don't know that but... wait a minute a bell is ringing. I remember the sentiment, I can understand immediately where it is coming from - you and I know what it means to pass up our possessions. Hm, so absolutely at a subconscious level that is where it came from. I think you are absolutely right. I must dig that out, it might be frighteningly close."
• The Old Magic was Lowe's thirteenth solo album. Lowe told The Huffington Post that he did not set out to record an album, rather, The Old Magic was the result of an "ongoing work": "Well, I tend not to record albums as a 'piece' because I'm not really that prolific. I'll wait until I've got three or four tunes, and then I'll round everybody up and we'll go record them. Then, quite a long time might go by before I've got three or four more that I think can turn out okay. So, it's not really a project, each record. It's more of an ongoing work. Yeah, that's really how it works."