Brand New Day - My Songs Version

Sting produced the Brand New Day album with Kipper, a film composer he met while working on the title song for the 1998 film The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone. Based on Rodman Philbrick's young adult novel Freak the Mighty, it's about two kids with physical and mental challenges who come together as the title hero. Sting and Kipper worked so well together that Sting invited him to his house in Italy to work for what was supposed to be a few days. Sting noted in Lyrics By Sting: "It went well - so well, in fact, that Kipper ended up staying for the next two albums, and together we became a kind of musical Freak the Mighty."

With this song, Sting offers an antidote to the "premillennial hokum" of doomsday prophecies and the Y2K scare. "Who but the most cynical of us would want to be right about the end of the world?" he wrote in Lyrics By Sting. "No, I think we make the world every day. Collectively, individually, by intention or accident, we dream our world into being. We just have to be careful what we dream."

Stevie Wonder played harmonica on this track, and is there a better way to inject happiness into a song than adding a dose of Stevie Wonder? Sting doesn't think so: "As a song, 'Brand New Day' captured the spirit of optimism that is so important to me, and if you can think of a more hopeful manifestation of joy than Stevie Wonder's harmonica, then be my guest."