Songfacts®:

• This song about searching for a lost love is the biggest hit for Lisa Stansfield, a white soul singer from Manchester, England. It was a #1 hit in the UK and topped the charts in about a dozen countries. In America, it went to #1 on the R&B chart, making Stansfield the first white British woman to top that tally and the second white woman to do so, following Teena Marie (with "Ooo La La La" in 1988).
• The song is known for its sultry spoken intro, where Stansfield says:
  
  I don't know where my baby is
  But I'll find him, somewhere, somehow
  
  Stansfield wrote and produced her songs from this era with Ian Devaney and Andy Morris; the three had a band together called Blue Zone before they decided to focus on Lisa's solo career. The spoken part came about when they were sitting around the piano. Andy played some chords and Lisa began talking in a low voice, in a Barry White way. They liked the way it sounded and put it on the record. Stansfield, Devaney and Morris are the writers on the track. (Stansfield and Devaney were boyfriend-girlfriend; they got married in 1998.
• The "I, I, I" in the line "Been around the world and I, I, I" is something Stansfield came up with while listening to the melody. It was just a placeholder until she could come up with proper lyrics, but her co-writer Ian Devaney thought it would make a great hook, so they left it in.
  
  That part tracks with the lyrics, giving us the impression that Stansfield is overcooked from her quest to find the guy she let down but is now madly in love with.
• Ian Devaney explained how the song was recorded in the book 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh: "We booked this little studio and started a really rough demo on an 8-track machine with Lisa's voice being done in one take. When we came to the proper recording, we transferred the original vocals to 24-track, added some strings and transferred it back to 8-track which we later mixed at home."
• P. Diddy (aka Puff Daddy, aka Sean Combs) built his 1997 hit "Been Around The World" around a sample of this song. Around this time he was sampling huge chunks of songs and turning them into hits, most famously "I'll Be Missing You," which is based on "Every Breath You Take" by The Police.
• Stansfield and her team were worried about what Barry White would think of the spoken intro, since it was so clearly influenced by him, but White loved it and even recorded the song as a duet with Stansfield in 1992.
• The beat on this song, combined with the percussive string stabs, was very popular sound in British music at the time, heard on tracks like "Close To You" by Maxi Priest and "Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)" by Soul II Soul. These songs were danceable but soulful, giving them wide crossover appeal.
• The music video is rather literal, with Stansfield rotating in a room with a map of the world and a collection of guys. She's also in the rain for some shots.
  
  The video got lots of airplay in Europe and made the playlists in America on both VH1 and BET.