Songfacts®:

• The melody of this song comes from an instrumental piano piece called "Heartstrings," written by the Norwegian composer Rolf Løvland. Streisand asked the singer/songwriter Ann Hampton Callaway, who had written Streisand's Higher Ground track "At the Same Time," to write lyrics to the melody so she could record it for her A Love Like Ours album.
  
  Callaway first tried to write around the title "Heartstrings," but Streisand wasn't happy with the results, calling the lyrics "Too literal." In our interview with Callaway, she explained: "I was having a lot of frustration writing a lyric with a very simple melody. It's harder to write lyrics to a simple melody than other types of melodies, so finally I decided: I knew she was getting married that year, so I would write a wedding song.
  
  What I didn't know was that she was getting married three days later. I wrote this song just in the nick of the time and she got the song three hours before she was getting married and sang it at her wedding reception and recorded it on A Love Like Ours. It's actually on six of her CDs and earned me my second platinum award, which was a big honor."
• Streisand closed out the millennium by announcing she was retiring from touring and staging a "farewell" Timeless tour, with the first concert being on New Year's Eve 1999 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on the Las Vegas Strip. But it was merely a hiatus: She hit the road again in 2006 on a 20-concert tour throughout the US and put on shows in continental Europe for the first time the following year.