Sting Intentionally Never Reveals the Meaning of This Hit Single From 1993

In 1993, Sting released “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” as the first single from Ten Summoner’s Tales, his fourth solo studio album. Written solely by Sting, “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” became a Top 5 single for Sting.

“If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” begins with, “You could say I lost my faith in science and progress / You could say I lost my belief in the holy church / You would say I lost my sense of direction / Yes, you could say all of this and worse but / If I ever lose my faith in you / There’d be nothing left for me to do.”

A positive, uplifting song, Sting later reveals that he intentionally leaves the object of someone’s faith ambiguous.

“I’ve just said if I ever lose my faith in you,” Sting explains. “And ‘you’ could be my producer, it could be faith in God. It could be faith in myself, or it could be faith in romantic love. It could be all of those things. I don’t define it. I think it’s important not to define it because once you can define something, it evaporates. I think it’s important in this day and age, when we are dictated to by music television what a particular song is about, that the old ambiguity that songs had can be retained.”

What Sting Says About the Success of “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You”

“If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” was the most played song on the radio in 1993. It also earned him a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Its success makes sense to Sting, even though he leaves the song to the listener’s interpretation.

“I suppose it captured a mood,” Sting reflects. “We’ve lost faith in a lot of institutions, our government, our churches – most things. And yet we still maintain a sense of hope about the future. I’m not sure where that hope is pinned, but it’s there somewhere. I’m never specific, in the song, about what I have faith in still.”

Sting deliberately made “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” in “two distinct parts,” taking the listener on quite a journey through the lyrics in the song.

“The first part is about the things I’ve lost faith in,” Sting explains. “It’s quite easy to be precise about the things I’ve lost faith in: politics, media, science, technology, the things that everybody has. And yet I, along with most other people, have a great deal of hope and a feeling that things will and can get better.

“So what do we place our faith in?” he adds. “I can’t define that as easily as I can define what I don’t believe in anymore.”

Ten Summoner’s Tales includes “Fields Of Gold”, which also became one of Sting’s biggest hits.

Photo by Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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