“Desert Rose” by Sting

"Desert Rose" is the song where Sting looked past the usual pop borders on Brand New Day, his sixth solo studio album, from 1999. It started the year before, when a Cheb Mami record sent him to see the Algerian raï singer live at Bercy, on a bill with Khaled, Rachid Taha and Steve Hillage. Sting wrote the music first, then asked Mami to improvise Arabic words over his melody. Mami came back with lines about longing, with no idea what Sting had written, and the two turned out to share the same ache.

Sting produced with Kipper, who also programmed the drum machine and played keyboards, and Simon Osborne co-produced and mixed. Dominic Miller's guitar, Ettamri Mustapha's darbuka and Kathryn Tickell's fiddle and Northumbrian pipes crowd around the two voices. It climbed to number 2 in Canada and 17 in the US.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.