Songfacts®:

• Lead singer Fran Healy wrote the song while on holiday in Israel. He wanted to go somewhere sunny because in his hometown of Glasgow it rained all the time. In an interview at the Live 8 concert, he explained that he was spending a short holiday in the southern vacation city Eilat in the middle of the winter. The city is known for its hot weather even during the winter time, but surprisingly it began to rain for two days during his stay. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Mor - Ness Ziona, Israel
• The line "Is it because I lied when I was 17?" is a reference to Healy taking a job in a bar at the age of 17 and telling his employer he was 18. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  joanne - glasgow, Scotland
• When Travis started to perform this song at the 1999 Glastonbury Festival, after being sunny for several hours, it began to rain exactly when the first line was sung. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Lee - Reading, England
• A few months after his trip to Israel, Healy was discouraged when the campaign promotion for the album wasn't doing well and was leery of his manager's false promises, which led to the verse, "I can't sleep tonight, everybody's saying everything's all right."
• In the second verse, he sings, "I'm being held up by invisible men." Healy told Jaxsta the invisible men were the managers and the record company: "Are they supporting me or are they holding me up: 'Give us all your money.' I wrote that verse and I thought, I'm sure there's something I can Lego together here... Oh yeah, there was that rain thing, and I stuck it on and then built a bridge from the verse to the chorus."
• The success of the single, which was the third one from the album after "Writing To Reach You" and "Driftwood," helped The Man Who make its slow ascent to #1 in the UK. The album brought the band international recognition and landed them on a bevy of best-of-the-year lists in prominent publications like Melody Maker, Mojo, and NME.
• In 2000, this earned Healy two trophies at the Ivor Novello Awards: Best Songwriter and Best Contemporary Song.
• After being attacked by children in the "Writing To Reach You" music video, also directed by John Hardwick, Healy finds himself in danger again for this song's clip - this time at the hands of his own bandmates. They lock him in the trunk of a '70s Vauxhaul Viva. He escapes and pursues them to an abandoned English mining quarry, located in Craddock Moor near Cornwall.
• This was used on the TV shows Cold Case ("Discretion" - 2004) and Gilmore Girls ("Rory's Birthday Parties" - 2000).
• The band's manager tried to deter them from releasing this as a single, saying, "Nobody wants to listen to a pop star moaning about the bloody weather."