Songfacts®:

• This is the title track from Sting's seventh solo studio album. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the singer wanted to create an album focused on love. He explained to The Daily Telegraph: "It's a post-September 11 record. I think it really was a watershed. An event like that makes you redefine your craft and question what function you serve in society. If the world's going to hell in a hand basket then, you know, how can you either help that along or stop it I'm 51 and I'm not going to write about dancing particularly, or girlfriends, or cars. There is a place for trivia in pop music. I'm responsible for some of it. But sometimes you've got to get serious. My intention is to create something beautiful and unique and pleasing to people and at the same time tell the truth about how I feel in the world."
• "I famously made an off-the-cuff comment about tantric sex one day that sped around the world like a digital virus and continues to reverberate even now, seventeen year later," Sting wrote of this song in Lyrics By Sting. "The interpretation that tantra has to do with 'staying power' is of course fatuous, but the idea that sex could be considered a sacred act seemed too much for a world media attuned to the minutiae of trivia. Sex is either scandalous - when, for example, politicians are caught in flagrante delicto - or it's used to sell cars and aftershave. In both cases, eroticism, the most powerful force in our human nature, is devalued to the point of worthlessness."
  
  As for that famous quote, Sting once claimed he and wife Trudie Styler had seven-hour tantric sex sessions. Years later he joked on Inside the Actors Studio that "seven hours includes movie and dinner."