Songfacts®:

• For 10 Songs, Travis' ninth studio album, lead singer Fran Healy stepped back into the role of primary songwriter for the first time since 2003's 12 Memories, when he took a break to care for his newborn son. While "Waving At The Window" was vaguely inspired by feelings from his own childhood, the tune about sad goodbyes was oddly prescient for a 2020 audience stuck in COVID-19 lockdown.
  
  Healy told Jaxsta: "I wrote that in 2018, and I wasn't sure what it was about. I had these memories of when I was young of saying goodbye to people and not having a dad, being a single parent family, being an only child as well, and lots of weird, unresolved feelings bubbled up, and it's got fragments of all these things in there. It's a song I'm still trying to work out. The weird thing was, when we finished the album COVID had just kicked in, and so suddenly we're all in lockdown, everyone's waving at windows."
• 10 Songs peaked at #5 in the UK. Aside from 2008's Ode To J. Smith, which halted at #20, all of the band's previous albums reached the Top 10. In the US, their highest-charting album was 2001's The Invisible Band, which peaked at #39.
• Upon reflection, Healy discovered this song, which opens the album, ultimately boils down to the theme of love and commitment. "That song is me talking to my wife," he told American Songwriter. "It's about love. I thought it was about me and my wife, but a lot of these songs can be about my band. Because it's the same thing. I'm married to these people. We're married, we're together, we love each other, it's a relationship. There are a lot of songs on this record that speak to this feeling where I'm 47 years old. I think parenthood maybe does it to you, it just f--king wears you down. You can feel your own energy depleting at a much quicker rate than even if you were using it yourself, because you've now given it to someone else."
• Healy told Apple Music the meaning of the line, "This is no rehearsal, this is a take": "People think you get second chances. You don't. I don't believe you do, and I think if you treat your life like it's an absolute gift that you'll never get again, that's the best way to treat your life. So I'm telling myself this with the line 'This is no rehearsal, this is a take.' Funnily enough, the way I write songs, I don't start with any ideas. I know that a lot of writers are like this. You start with playing a piano, or in this case, the riff from 'Waving at the Window.' The way I kind of played it on the guitar, it was kind of ping-y, like these guitars you get in Akira Kurosawa movies."