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Secret Journey

Secret Journey Upon a secret journey I met a holy man His blindness was his wisdom I'm such a lonely man And as the world was turning It rolled itself in pain This does not seem to touch you He pointed to the rain You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this And when you've made your secret journey You will find this love you miss And on the days that followed I listened to his words I strained to understand him I chased his thoughts like birds You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this And when you've made your secret journey You will find this love you miss You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this You will see joy in this sadness You will find this love you miss And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man

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Secret Journey by The Police

Songfacts®:

• In a Ghost in the Machine press release, October 1981, Sting said: "It's a quasi-mystical song. You have to do something, go somewhere, to get outside yourself. I read the book Meetings with Remarkable Men which says you have to make a journey. It doesn't have to be a real journey, it can be a mental journey." >> Suggestion credit : Sean - Altoona, WI
• Sting noted in Lyrics By Sting : "I was looking for some spiritual guidance in my own life and, after a few false leads, finally began to listen to the discrete language of my own heart."
• This was only released as a single in the US as an alternative to " Invisible Sun ," which was a single exclusive to the UK and Ireland.
• More songs from The Police
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Secret Journey (song)

" Secret Journey " is a song by The Police from their 1981 album, Ghost in the Machine . Written by Sting , the song tells of a mystical journey that will make the traveller a "holy man".

Although "Secret Journey" was not released as a single in Europe, the song did see a single release in some countries, such as the United States and Canada.

• 1.1 Reception
• 2 Personnel
• 3.1 7": A&M / AM 2408-S (US)
• 5 References

According to Sting, the lyrical inspiration for "Secret Journey" was the 1963 novel Meetings with Remarkable Men , written by George Gurdjieff . Sting said the following about the song:

"It's a quasi-mystical song. You have to do something, go somewhere, to get outside yourself. I read the book Meetings with Remarkable Men which says you have to make a journey. It doesn't have to be a real journey, it can be a mental journey." —  Sting, Ghost in the Machine press release, October 1981 [1]

Sting mentioned the song in Lyrics by Sting , saying, "I was looking for some spiritual guidance in my own life and, after a few false leads, finally began to listen to the discrete language of my own heart." [1]

"Secret Journey" was released as a single in May 1982 in the United States and Canada, as an alternative to the single " Invisible Sun " which was only released in some parts of Europe, such as the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was also released as a single in Australia (the only country to receive both the "Invisible Sun" and "Secret Journey" singles) and New Zealand .

The song charted at No. 29 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and also reached No. 46 on the Billboard Hot 100. [2]

The B-side of "Secret Journey" was "Darkness", a Stewart Copeland penned track that was also from Ghost in the Machine . Copeland said of the track in 2000, "Darkness is a song about vertigo. I'm very proud of it, and there's not really much to say about it." [3]

The song was performed live only in America for ten days on the Ghost in the Machine Tour .

In the liner notes for Ghost in the Machine , "Secret Journey" was called a "superb song", while in the Melody Maker review of the album, it was called "the record's highest moment." [4] Giovanni Dadamo of The Face noted the track as one of the "magic moments" on Ghost in the Machine, and it was also described as "perhaps the best cut on the album" by Chart Songwords . [4] It received a positive review from AllMusic ' s Greg Prato. [5] Ultimate Classic Rock critic Mike Duquette rated it as the Police's 20th greatest song. [6]

The Police's guitarist, Andy Summers , noted "Secret Journey" as one of his personal favourite Police songs, saying, "I always thought that should have been a single." [7]

• Sting – lead and backing vocals, bass
• Andy Summers – guitars, Roland GR300 guitar synthesizer
• Stewart Copeland – drums, percussion

Track listing

7": a&m / am 2408-s (us).

• "Secret Journey" – 3:34
• "Darkness" – 3:14
• ^ The Police Billboard Charts History , Billboard.com.
• ^ Garbarini, Vic (Spring 2000). "I think if we came back..." , Revolver .
• ^ a b "Ghost in the Machine" . thepolice.com .
• ^ Prato, Greg. "Ghost in the Machine" . allmusic.com .
• ^ Duquette, Mike (6 May 2022). "All 70 Police Songs Ranked Worst to Best" . Ultimate Classic Rock . Retrieved 5 June 2022 .
• ^ Crandall, Bill. "Guitarist Andy Summers stands up for his band" .
• ^ "The Police – Chart history" . Billboard . Retrieved 3 May 2022 .
• ^ Whitburn, Joel (2014). Cash Box Pop Hits 1952-1996 . Sheridan Books, Inc. ISBN   978-0-89820-209-0 .
• Articles with short description
• Short description with empty Wikidata description
• EngvarB from May 2015
• Use dmy dates from May 2015
• Articles with missing files
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• The Police songs
• 1982 singles
• A&M Records singles
• Song recordings produced by Hugh Padgham
• Songs written by Sting (musician)

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Secret Journey

"Secret Journey" is a song written by Sting and recorded by The Police in 1981 .

• 1 About the song
• 2 Personnel
• 3.2.1 7" Singles
• 4.2 Nominations
• 4.3 Certifications
• 5.1 LP lyrics
• 5.2 demo lyrics
• 6 Quotations and trivia
• 7 Alternative and cover versions
• 9 External links
• 10 References

About the song

There are four known versions of this song. The two Sting demos both feature a third verse that's not on the LP version. One of the demos starts with the main instrumental riff and then the first verse - featuring a long outro. The second demo starts with the vocals only chorus and has a shorter outro.

Besides the known LP version there's also an early mix from AIR Studios which is only 2:55 minutes long.

The basic structure is the same as on the LP version. But the song is counted it by Stewart, so the song doesn't start with the long synth guitar intro. Stewart's drums are those from the LP version, but right before the first verse he plays a small break that was muted for the LP mix.

You can see Sting playing the bass for this (and hear Stewart couting in and doing that drum break) in his movie Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out .

The vocals seem to be the LP versions's vocals, too, although not properly mixed.

The guitar parts are the most noticeable difference - besides the missing intro the guitars in the middle section (played by Andy on a Roland GR-300 ) are different, too. The LP's additional guitar part over the main riff during the end is completely absent.

Close to the end the LP version fades out the instruments. Listen closely (and crank up the volume) and right at the end you can hear Stewart change to playing more toms / snare. That goes on longer on this "work in progress" version where Sting also sings his lines one more time - so the fade-out comes much later here, while the guitar synth in the back sounds similar to the LP version.

This section needs more information.

Release History

Secret Journey appears on the following album releases:

Awards, nominations, and certifications

Nominations, certifications.

Lyrics are property and copyright of their owners, and provided here for educational purposes only.

demo lyrics

There are two known Sting demos for this song - one starts with the instruments and is about 3:55 minutes long because of the longer outro. The other one starts with a vocals only chorus and is about 3:42 minutes long. Both feature a third verse that's not on the LP version.

Quotations and trivia

• In Music U.K. from October 1981 Andy Summers talks about Omegaman (the first paragraphs) and the intro to Secret Journey :

"The first thing I had done was to go in and play a very nice Larry Carlton type solo with the 335 - it ws very nice, but for The Police it was a little bit too.... derivative sounding, a little bit too straight. So I started again with the Multivox effects plugged up and I had the Roland guitar synth going through them. The Duet on the synth was switched to a minor second apart, which is pretty excruciating (laughs), through a fuzz and something, and it just sounded incredible! I could see their hair standing on end in the control room, they couldn't believe this fucking sound that was coming over! And I was having great fun, in hysterics, it was like ten cats being strangled. So I thought it was really exciting, and I did it, and they're going, "Yeah, yeah..." like a couple of roadies were in the studio. And Hugh was saying, "Yeah, pretty heavy.".

Course, finally Stewart and Sting came in, and there was dead silence, and they didn't like it. It was a bit too heavy for them. I was a bit disgruntled, but.... so I went back. I started again and found a figure that really worked. So I sort of used the same sound, but I returned the guitar synth to fifths, I think, played the figure on the end, and it worked really nicely with a normal electric guitar playing the figure and the guitar synth. That went down a little better, I s'pose it fitted the track a bit better. Not quite as hairy as the other one.

That's the first time I actually used guitar synth for a solo. Personally, for me, I don't really use it as a solo instrument playing lead solos, I like it as a chordal thing, like great sheets of sound. I really enjoy using it that way. Like there's an introduction to a song called Secret Journey , there's about a minute and a half of just guitar synth on it, I'm playing long chords, strange chords, it was fun to do that. There's a whole section in the middle of that with the guitar synth, too.

Into the intro to Secret Journey I'm playing these strange chords, with the synth tuned in fifths, and you get this sound, with echo and chorus on it. And also, against that I played some very weird stuff on a Strat, so you get this great sort of cloud effect untill the riff actually starts coming in, the riff sort of fades up through it and then the song starts. Then it shuts off (claps hands) like that in the middle and then you get wahhhhhhhhhhh.. the sound of the Himalayas comes in. It's good."

• In 1982-09 Guitar Player Andy tells this version:

"I'm playing really peculiar chords on the Strat, feeding it back at the same time, and wanging on the Tremolo arm. Then I've also got a background of guitar synthesizers playing in the middle part. There's like an opening minute-and-a-half of guitar synthesizer with all these chords going on, and then there's a break in the middle which is the two guitars together. I like the way it stops: You suddenly drop into this hole and a sort of Himalayan sheet of sound comes towards you."

In a 'Ghost In The Machine' Press Release, October 1981, Sting said the following about the song:

"It's a quasi-mystical song. You have to do something, go somewhere, to get outside yourself. I read the book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" which says you have to make a journey. It doesn't have to be a real journey, it can be a mental journey."

Alternative and cover versions

There are two different Sting demos - both with an additional third verse. A "work in progress" mix from AIR Studios lacks the guitar intro and other guitar parts and also fades out later.

External links

• Police, The. Ghost In The Machine . (1981) [Audio recording], A&M Records.
• Rolling Stone - February 18, 1982 (Roland GR300)
• Songs (The Police)
• Songs (Sting)

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Sting’s Salvation: Songwriter Opens Up About Dark Obsessions, Rock Rebirth

By Stephen Rodrick

Stephen Rodrick

Sting sits on a stool in a rehearsal space on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He cradles his bass and waits for drummer Vinnie Colaiuta to count in “50,000,” a rocking lament to Bowie, Prince, Lemmy and others lost this year. It’s from 57th & 9th , his first rock album in 13 years. His Springsteen-esque biceps pop out of a gray T-shirt. (Those muscles made middle-age women gasp and fan themselves at a downtown acoustic show the night before.) Muffled, ungodly sounds leak through the walls. It’s Kiss mucking about next door. “Do you know Gene Simmons?” asked Sting later. “An interesting guy.”

Colaiuta starts the count, and an Australian camera crew filming the proceedings moves in for a close-up. Sting halts his band for a moment. He sends his fingers on a not-so-secret journey.

“OK, no boogers.”

A publicist titters, but Sting gives a naughty grin and shrugs: “It’s always good to check.”

In the three days I spent with him, Sting played against the cliché of him as a dour rock god with an overly earnest sense of self-importance. Sometimes he failed: He humble-bragged that he received an award from BMI for “For Every Breath You Take” being played 13 million times in the United States. “That’s quite a lot,” he said with arched eyebrows. This was shortly after he marveled about Bob Dylan’s I’m-not-there attitude toward winning the Nobel Prize.

Still, Sting now seems in on the joke that he is a tantric-sex-practicing, lute-playing semi-egomaniac. He now sends up his own exalted image with comic timing. During a break in rehearsal, he did an extended riff on his much-maligned lute album from a decade ago, Songs From the Labyrinth , which he takes pains to point out sold a million copies. “People had a go at me,” he says as we sit cross-legged in the studio parking lot to try and get away from Simmons’ caterwauling. “People were like, ‘I don’t want to listen to the fucking lute.’ I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with the lute?'” He pauses and smiles. “I think the instrument suffers from the Monty Pythonization of the lute.”

But the levity only goes so far. After a break, the band, including longtime guitarist Dominic Miller, cranks out “50,000,” which contains the cheery lyric:

I’m feeling a little better today, Although the bathroom mirror is telling me something else. These lines of stress, One bloodshot eye, The unhealthy pallor of a troubled ghost. Where did I put my spectacle case? I’m half blind and as deaf as any post.

OK, so Sting is never gonna be the rock & roll equivalent of the office clown blowing beer out of his nose at the office Christmas party. “I think death is the most interesting subject in any art form, whether it’s literature or poetry or opera,” Sting told me a month earlier while talking about “50,000” in his New York home on Central Park West. He’d just shown me a 1962 photo of the street he grew up on in Newcastle in England, with a looming shipyard at the end of the block. Everything in that neighborhood has turned to dust; his house, his parents, the shipyard. Staring at the photo had put him in a melancholy mood, an emotional state that he admits he revels in a little too much.

“Pop music is supposed to be about girlfriends and cars and the color of your shoes,” he says. The banality of pop music is a familiar Sting trope that has led him to be accused of taking himself way, way, way too seriously since his “King of Pain” days. He pets his dog, a pointer named Compass. “I’m 64. Most of my life has been lived already, and then, like most of us when a cultural icon dies, we’re children.” He stretches his palms outward. “Because you think, ‘How could he or she die?'”

He cheerily admits to being a workaholic; he notoriously slept through the birth of his first child. I ask him if he thought he’d made enough time for his six children – two of whom are musicians – in between his touring and recording. “That’s a good question,” he says. “If my kids would ever complain about that, I would say to them, only half serious or half not serious, ‘For some reason, you chose me as a parent.’ Not I chose you, you chose me. Because that makes them less of a victim. They’ve all turned out beautifully. I give all credit to their mothers.” He pauses for a moment. “Was I a perfect parent? No. I wasn’t parented terribly well myself, so I didn’t really have an idea.”

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We agree to pick up the conversation in a few weeks. On the way out of a living room lined with books, I point at a painting I liked, an abstract with a lightbulb in the middle. “Oh, that’s a Basquiat,” says Sting offhandedly as he sips a cup of tea. Andy [Warhol] did the lightbulb.” He whispers the next bit. “My grandchildren like to come in and put their hands all over it. They don’t know what it is.” He grins. “It’s great.”

Sting named 57th & 9th after a Manhattan corner he would cross every morning on the way to the studio. He’d stop and meditate for a moment about his day to come and days past before crossing the clotted street. He spends much of his time in New York with his wife, Trudie Styler, a film producer. His kids are grown, and he and Styler are now empty nesters. He appreciates the relative anonymity Manhattan provides him. “People here are all in their own TV show,” he says. “They might stop and say, ‘Hey, Sting, I like your music,’ or ‘Hey, Sting, you suck,’ but then you just go on.”

Over the past decade, Sting has done everything but record a rock record. Besides that lute album, there was an orchestral version of his greatest hits, a Police reunion and the passion project of The Last Ship , a musical set in the Newcastle shipyard neighborhood of his childhood. It wasn’t a financial success – Sting had to step into a lead role to goose ticket sales – but he says he cherished every moment he spent working on the project.

He has a complicated relationship with Newcastle; the new album has a song called “Heading South on the Old North Road,” about escaping one’s hometown, and he points out there is a reason why the best song by Newcastle’s the Animals was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” It was one of Sting’s theme songs back when he was a boy delivering milk with his silent father in the predawn hours. His parents were stuck in a sullen, infidelity-infested marriage, and Sting couldn’t wait to get out on his own. “I’ve always considered myself in exile,” says Sting. “Not really from my hometown, but from my country. I live in New York, but I’m not American. Exile is a useful point of view for an artist. Look at someone like James Joyce.” He quickly adds, “Not that I’m fucking James Joyce.”

Unlike on his previous solo albums, where songs and arrangements would be painstakingly laid out beforehand, Sting entered the studio for 57th & 9th with nothing – no lyrics, no melodies and no concept. “We would just ping-pong lines back and forth,” he says. “A bass line or something until we had a riff or a tune we liked.”

Sting is a prodigious walker – you can often see him strolling through Central Park – and he’d think about the songs while moving about. But he still had to write the words. So, he would get home from a walk, pour himself a cup of coffee, put on his heavy coat, grab his guitar, and sit on his frigid balcony with gorgeous views of the Manhattan skyline. He didn’t allow himself into the house until he’d written a set of lyrics. “I wrote four songs in two days,” says Sting. “It was fucking cold.”

Sting then brought the songs inside, usually playing them for Trudie, who Sting claims is his toughest critic. “She won’t say something is awful,” he says with a long-married smile. “But I can tell.” Except for “Heading South on the Great North Road,” Sting says he’s playing a character on every song on the album. The lead single, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You,” comes across on first listen as a straight-ahead love song, but it’s really, according to Sting, about an artist searching for his muse. It’s a standard Sting approach – going back to “Every Breath You Take,” a stalker song disguised as a love ballad. “People aren’t really used to songs being articulate anymore,” says Sting, slipping into the mode of the schoolteacher he once was. “They’re just kind of meaningless. They have the semblance of meaning, but it’s not connected. I don’t like that. I like songs that actually mean something.”

Sting has been writing covert protest songs since the Police ‘s “Driven to Tears,” so it’s not a surprise that there’s a passel of slightly disguised political songs on the record. “One Fine Day” humorously deals with the quixotic hope that climate change is in fact a myth as the world melts around us. “Ishallah” tackles the refugee crisis from a humanitarian point of view, and “Empty Chair” is an ode to foreign correspondent James Foley, who was executed by ISIS in 2014. A recent interviewer recently linked Sting to Woody Guthrie, a comparison that baffles him. “Woody Guthrie, that I’ve never heard,” says Sting with a smirk. “Woody Woodpecker, yes.”

Watch Sting Perform Career-Spanning Medley at AMAs

As a legal alien in America, he tried to hold his tongue on the subject of Donald Trump, but he was crestfallen by the Brexit vote in his native Britain. “The concept was introduced by Winston Churchill in 1946,” says Sting, offering a brief history lesson. “He said we should have a trading group and then we won’t fight. Well, sure enough, 70 years of peace on the continent. Before, we had been knocking the crap out of each other for centuries. Now what?”

Sting has been an activist for more than 30 years, but he keeps a lower profile about it these days, content to run his Rainforest Foundation Fund with Styler and a board of experts, working on smaller projects that help people in 21 countries in the subequatorial parts of the world. “Sometimes, when you’re a star, the media tends to follow wherever you point your finger,” he says. “I’m done with that approach.”

The politics of his songs have evolved as well. We talk about “We Work the Black Seam,” a 1985 lament about Thatcherism, the danger of nuclear power and the loss of coal jobs in Newcastle and other areas that were dear to Sting’s childhood. Now, he is more versed in the downside of dirty coal and the necessity of nuclear power. “What we know about power, I would say my position has shifted,” he says. “I think if we’re going to tackle global warming, I think nuclear power is the only way you can create massive amounts of power.”

Inside, the band is waiting. He wants to make one thing perfectly clear.

“But hey, I’m not a scientist.”

Between our two visits, I turned 50 while Sting hit 65. He was keen to talk about the mileposts, even if, when we first met, he professed not knowing exactly how old he was. Now a senior citizen, Sting still looks, annoyingly, 38. It’s not by accident. Every morning he swims laps for an hour while listening to the Bach cello concertos played by Yo-Yo Ma. He then does a Pilates class. He describes himself as “vain and disciplined.” I ask if there was ever a point where he’d let himself go and put on 20 or 30 pounds post-tour. He looks at me as if I was mad: “Fuck no! I’d kill myself. I’d just die of shame. I’m a fattist when it comes to myself.”

The one thing Sting has failed at is a return to vegetarianism. He swore to me by the next time we talked he’d have given up meat, but it hadn’t happened. “We had a farm in England where we had livestock, so I thought, ‘Well, I better eat them,'” he says with a shrug. “I know we got to stop eating meat because it’s killing the environment.”

With all the talk of self-preservation, you could get the idea that Sting was one of those celebrities who have convinced themselves that their exalted state in the people food chain means, just possibly, that they’ll never die. Not so. The day before he turned 65, he played before a crowd of 100,000 at halftime of Australian Rules football’s version of the Super Bowl, in Melbourne. He then spent most of his birthday alone at his hotel thinking about having more days behind him than in front of him.

“I have been thinking about death since I was a kid.”

He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and writing about death. His parents died young, and Sting skipped their funerals, blaming touring responsibilities, but now knows it was a mistake. Still, he hasn’t exactly made his peace with the end. “I have been thinking about death since I was a kid,” says Sting, who was raised Catholic. “I get a kind of spiritual vertigo. I was brought up in a religious background with ideas of eternity, eternal torment or eternal heaven, which sounded just as tormented to me. I became obsessed with it, maybe morbid about it.”

One of Sting’s attempts to parse mortality has been through multiple experiences taking the drug ayahuasca, a psychedelic popular in South American spiritual ceremonies. “I think it’s a way of rehearsing the feeling of being dead,” he says, stressing it’s not a pleasure drug. “Every time, I have to work up the courage to do it. You basically face your mortality, and it’s as if you’re dead, out of time. Your whole life passes front of you in this other realm. I can only sound vague about it. Most people die in total panic. Terror. I think there’s another way. We’re supposed to die. There must be a way to die peacefully and welcoming.”

Listening to Sting and his band play songs from 57th & 9th , one of the first things I notice is that there is clear space between the instruments. Love him or hate him, Sting’s songs are rarely cluttered with a cacophony of sound to disguise the lack of an idea. There’s a touch of audio aloofness to them, as if Sting has a secret that he’s not quite letting you in on. That aloofness is present in his personality as well. You get a sense that he’s throwing a jab that keeps the rest of the world from grabbing him in a clinch. “I’ve been with him for 27 years, but I wouldn’t say we are very close,” says Dominic Miller, his long-time guitarist. “I remember meeting him for the first time and my instinct was saying, ‘Don’t get too close to this guy on a personal level’ – there was an emotional distance.” Miller stubs out a cigarette. “But what I can do is get very close to him on a musical level.”

The loner part of Sting is largely responsible for the Police breaking up after only nine years. “A band is a democracy,” says Sting. “Or the semblance of democracy. You have to pretend more in a band.” While he claimed to have enjoyed the Police’s 2007 reunion, Sting might be fibbing. “It was a return back to that forced democracy and reminded me just why I’m not in the band,” he says. “It was Stewart’s band. He started it, he named it, and it was his concept.” I ask if the band was still a democracy by 1983, the time of Synchronicity and Policemania. He slyly smiles and shrugs. “No.”

Sting is still friendly with ex-bandmates Andy Summers and Copeland, who he saw before a Hollywood Bowl show last year. He said the reunion tour isn’t likely to be repeated again: “For me, it closed the circle. We’d never officially broke up. It was perfect timing. For me, it feels complete.”

Listening in on his rehearsal with his current band, Sting seems more relaxed and forgiving. “One of us can make a mistake and he just goes with it or it opens a new avenue,” says Miller. That is real growth for Sting from his earlier days. Asked about his long reputation for being a not-so-benevolent dictator, he readily nods his head. “I used to be an arrogant, feisty old fucker. I’m a better bandleader. I’m a more calm person.” He pauses a second and gives a Cheshire grin. “I think.”

The calmer Sting was present the night after the presidential election in New York. While the citizens of Manhattan freaked out and binge drank before a show at Irving Plaza, Sting appeared and acknowledged that many in the crowd had been “traumatized.” Instead of a lecture, he led the crowd in chanting the very British slogan: Keep Calm and Carry On . Perhaps not coincidentally, he launched into “Message in a Bottle,” and the well-heeled crowd sang a little louder at the chorus: “Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S. …”

There was more healing to do a few days later in Paris. Sting reopened the Bataclan, where, last November, 89 concertgoers were murdered by Islamic terrorists. He addressed the crowd in French. “We will not forget them,” Sting said. “Tonight we have two tasks to settle. First, to remember and honor those who lost their life in the attacks. Then, to celebrate life and music.”

Ambition in the young and beautiful can leave a sour taste. Ambition in the old and beautiful can be endearing. The night before his band rehearsal, Sting did an acoustic sing-and-talk show at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. Sting was busy being Sting, questioning why he had to hold a microphone, barely not rolling his eyes at questions he thought banal and asking his host to guess how many years it would take to listen to all of his music that had been accessed on Spotify – just his solo work, mind you, no Police work. When the host shrugged, Sting told him, “Twenty-seven years. Imagine that.”

He also reported that “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You” had entered the charts at Number Four on something called the Adult Alternative airplay chart. Sting hadn’t made any chart for a decade, and you could tell it meant a lot to him. But there was more to the story that he didn’t share with the audience. His musician daughter, Eliot Sumner, was on the same chart, right ahead of her father.

He had told me the story earlier: “It was fantastic. She was thrilled and said, ‘Ah, Dad, we’re in the same chart.”‘ He paused for a second, and the mask Sting sometimes wears fell over his chiseled face. “She actually had one more play than me.”

I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. And then he broke into a toothy smile. For a moment, Sting wasn’t Sting, just a proud father. It was a good look on him. 

Inside Sting’s first rock album in decades.

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Sting – Secret Journey lyrics

Upon a secret journey I met a holy man His blindness was his wisdom I'm such a lonely man

And as the world was turning It rolled itself in pain This does not seem to touch you He pointed to the rain

You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this And when you've made your secret journey You will find this love you miss

And on the days that followed I listened to his words I strained to understand him I chased his thoughts like birds

You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this You will see joy in this sadness You will find this love you miss

And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man And when you've made your secret journey You will be a holy man

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Sting – Secret Journey lyrics

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Secret Journey

Lyrics submitted by Demau Senae

Secret Journey Lyrics as written by Gordon Sumner

Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

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A wonderful song, very straightforward. A young man receives training by a sage -- very "Eastern" in nature. The novel "Siddhartha" has a storyline like the one described in the song.

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“Secret Journey,” with its talk of holy men and “light in the darkness,” was based on Gurdjieff’s book, Meetings with Remarkable Men. The text narrated the exploits of a group of spiritual adventurers out searching for hidden mysteries, emotionally unattached to phenomena which are ultimately as fleeting as the rain, and thereby finding joy and love in life’s play of sadness and pain. In one of the semi-autobiographical tales, Gurdjieff himself was blindfolded (“His blindness was his wisdom”) and led to an enigmatic monastery.

[From Rock & Holy Rollers: The Spiritual Beliefs of Chart-Topping Rock Stars in Their Lives and Lyrics by Geoffrey D. Falk.]

Maybe it has something to do with the masons? The song is 3:33 seconds long alluding to some Masonic symbolism. Also, the masons believe that in the darkness you will find the light (the light being lucifer or something to that degree). The only reason I believe it to be Masonic is because it's 3:33 seconds long and is about a secret journey or secret society and has to do with becoming a holy man which is what the masons strive to do. Am I wrong? Let me know what you think

I thought it meant a man went on a "secret journey" [secret = personal?] and found himself. The holy man was himself. But that doesn't make much sense.

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@DJgif Actually, I think this is exactly what Sting meant.

Oh sure, that would make sense! I actually like the idea: The narrator meets the older and wiser version of himself (the holy man) who tells him that he shouldn't worry because eventually everything had worked out well (or will work out well, depending on which point of view you're talking from).

In general, I think this is a very nice song of describing the relationship to a person, older than you and experienced in how to handle their life, who had a special influence on you (eg. your parents, a teacher, an older colleague/friend).

"And as the world was turning It rolled itself in pain This does not seem to touch you He pointed to the rain You will see light in the darkness You will make some sense of this "

I think what these lines want to say is: When you're young, you often worry too much about things (you think the problem you're just dealing with is so big that it makes the earth roll in pain) and every now and then it's good to have someone older and wiser around you, who proves you that life always goes on and that maybe you will see things from a different point of view as time goes on.

However, for the younger one it's often difficult to understand what the older one wants to tell them, simply because they lack personal experience:

"I listened to his words I strained to understand him I chased his thoughts like birds"

As for the image of the "holy man": A priest recently told me that in the Catholic church, somebody who's "holy" is not seen as a perfect person but as someone "who made the best of their talents given" or, speaking more informally, "who did it right". I don't know if Sting meant it that way when he chose the word "holy", but anyway I think it fits.

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Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco Enjoy Loved-Up Basketball Date Night Courtside with Sting and Other Stars

The couple attended the game along with a host of other stars on April 22

Sarah Stier/Getty

Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco are getting cozy courtside!

The "Calm Down" singer and her music producer boyfriend were spotted on a date night at the New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia 76ers basketball game at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Monday, April 22, while joined courtside by Sting and an array of other star-studded attendees.

Gomez, 31, (who looked chic in a maroon leather trench coat by DUCIE ) and Blanco, 36, were seen getting very close during the match as they also took the time to mingle with Sting, 72, who sat beside them.

Other stars in attendance at the April 22 game were Chris Rock , Ben Stiller , Christopher Meloni , Carmelo Anthony and Saturday Night Live ’ s Ego Nwodim and Cecily Strong.

Gomez’s date night with Blanco comes after she shared photos of the pair on her Instagram Stories on April 12.

In one snap, the couple kissed as the singer caressed Blanco's neck with one hand, while he cradled her elbow. A second photo showed Blanco kissing Gomez’s hand as they took a joint selfie in a car.

Gomez shared the snaps at the same time she denied Instagram rumors of her previously dating John F. Kennedy ’s only grandson, Jack Schlossberg, from 2020 to 2021.

David Dow/NBAE via Getty

“Never met this human sorry,” the Only Murders in the Building star replied to the rumors in an Instagram post .

An insider told PEOPLE earlier this month that Gomez and Blanco are said to be “so in love” after confirming their relationship in December 2023 , adding that the two stars are in a “serious relationship.”

Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories.

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"They are so in love," said the source. "It’s a very serious relationship, and they’re making long distance work while she’s in New York for work commitments."

"Benny makes her feel special and they try to see each other as much as possible," the insider continued. "She really does feel like it’s the best she’s ever been treated by a guy, and she’s had a certain glow since they started dating."

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Secret Journey

About Secret Journey

"Secret Journey" is a song by The Police from their 1981 album, Ghost in the Machine. Written by Sting, the song tells of a mystical journey that will make the traveller a "holy man". Although "Secret Journey" was not released as a single in Europe, the song did see a single release in some countries, such as the United States and Canada.

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The Police was an English rock band formed in London in 1977. For the vast majority of their history, the band consisted of Sting (lead vocals, bass), Andy Summers (guitar) and Stewart Copeland (drums). The Police became globally popular in the late 1970s and are generally regarded as one of the first New Wave groups to achieve mainstream success, playing a style of rock that was influenced by punk, reggae, and jazz. more »

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Written by: Gordon Sumner

Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

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