Songoftheday 8/19/17 - I looked out across the river today, saw a city in the fog and an old church town where the seagulls play....

"All This Time" - Sting
from the album The Soul Cages (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #5 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's song of the day comes from Sting, who had two very successful solo albums after disbanding the Police in the late 1980's. The second of those, ...Nothing Like The Sun, had scored him a pair of top-20 pop hits in America with "We'll Be Together" and "Be Still My Beating Heart". He also sent three tracks from that album to Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart: a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" (#11), "The Lazarus Heart" (#30), and "An Englishman In New York" (#32), with the latter becoming the sole one from the record to make the top-40 in his native Britain courtesy of a dance remix from Ben Liebrand (#15). In 1990, Sting released his third solo effort, The Soul Cages, a deeply personal work dealing with his father's death. The first single, "All This Time", though, was upbeat in tempo and lush in production (using the then-new "Q Sound" 3D approximation technology), and radio took him back in...

"All This Time" became Sting's fourth top ten pop hit in the U.S. in March of 1991. The song was massive on rock radio, topping Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart for seven weeks, his solo career best (the Police's "Every Breath You Take" topped for nine weeks), while also hitting #1 on their Modern Rock list for two weeks as well. The track also climbed to #9 on the Adult Contemporary (or "easy listening") chart. Internationally, the single spent a week atop the chart in Canada, hit the top ten in Norway (#7), and reached the top-40 in Ireland (#13), Switzerland (#18), France (#21), the UK (#22), the Netherlands (#22), Germany (#23), Austria (#23), and Australia (#26).

Despite the success of the single, and maybe because of the intimate nature of the album, "All This Time" was the only hit single from The Soul Cages on pop radio. The hard-edged guitar-led title track, which did manage to reach the top ten on the mainstream (#7) and modern (#9) rock radio chart, missed the pop Hot 100 completely, but made up for it by winning the first Grammy Award for Rock Song in 1992. A third release in the States, "Why Should I Cry For You?", climbed to #32 on the mainstream rock list. In Britain, the exotic-sounding "Mad About You" was offered as the follow-up to "All This Time", and stalled down at #56 (followed by "Soul Cages" at #57).

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Here's Sting on the tour behind the Soul Cages album in 1991...