Songfacts®:

• Sting said about this: "The song started as a rock song, but the lyrics just kept screaming out to be a Country song. So it ended up with two notes to the bar in the bass and evolved into a country-rock shuffle. The guy's singing the song cynically at first, then while gazing up at the stars he has this revelation about all life being connected, that he's supported by the universe. He continues to sing the song, but now he means it. His pain is gone. As a young man I was quite angry and bitter. I felt shut out of the world. So I can relate to younger bands making angry music with a lot of attitude, but my music has finally gone past that to the next stage. Not acceptance, but beginning to understand the cycles of life rather than getting caught in that loop of anger-of hurt, revenge, hurt, revenge. Like the guy in the song says, 'Everybody has to leave the darkness sometime.'"
• Sting later rerecorded this song as a duet with Toby Keith. The resulting single made it to #2 of the Billboard Country chart. >>

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  Fintan - Manchester, England, for above 2
• Sting performed the duet with Keith at the Country Music Awards. In the audience, he was seated next to country legend Brenda Lee, who chatted with him about his family. "Strange to think that so many years ago I bopped with my mother to 'Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree.' Now here was Brenda herself, treating me like a long-lost nephew," Sting wrote in Lyrics By Sting.
• This was featured on the pilot episode of The Sopranos in 1999.
• The music video, directed by Lol Creme, follows a mohawked Sting riding a horse through the countryside past gleaming farm animals and through a small town with trucks hovering in the sky. He ends up at a barn where genial townsfolk are line-dancing along with cowboy-hat-wearing aliens.
• Sting has a soft spot for this song, he told The Baltimore Sun in 1996: "I find that quite moving. I know I wrote it, but I listen to it and actually find it quite moving, because it makes a journey. I don't know. Maybe it's a song for people who have been divorced, you know. People who haven't been divorced, well, maybe they won't understand it. But I'm quite proud of that song. I think that's my favorite song on the record, actually.''