Songfacts®:

• An updated version of the 1966 Beatles song, this is a track from The Imagine Project, an international recording featuring collaborations between jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock and musicians from every region of the planet. "Music truly is the universal language," said Herbie Hancock in a press release before the album's release. "The Imagine Project will explore that concept across the globe, uniting a myriad of cultures through song and positive creative expression. My hope is that the music will serve as a metaphor for the actions taken by the inhabitants of this wonderful planet as a call for world harmony on all levels."
• For this track recorded in San Francisco, Hancock worked with South African-American musician Dave Matthews. The American jazz legend told Billboard magazine about the song: "He just had a melodic idea with some chords. And we were sitting in the green room in the Fantasy Studios in San Francisco and he had this small guitar - a short-scale Gryphon by Joe Veillette - and the sound from it is intimate, it's acoustic. He played the first two chords and not only did it not sound like a Dave Matthews song, it didn't sound like anything I had heard from pop music. I said, 'Wait a minute - I'm hearing some kind of gamelan thing.' I've been to Bali three times. I found a gamelan sound on the synthesizer. I overdubbed it, and it just worked.
  While we were listening to playbacks and doing some fixing of things, Dave was sitting in the corner of the studio and he had a pad, and he's sitting there writing. He's telling me the words, and it starts out with, 'Falling off the roof/Looking up at the stars/Trying to get away from this world'... and I'm like, 'Oh, this is deep.' [Laughs.] Then I asked Dave, because I had already talked about the concept of the project, 'How do you feel about it being translated into either Balinese or Indonesian?' He said, 'Go for it.'"