Sting recorded this melancholy piano ballad to pay tribute to James Foley, a journalist killed by ISIS in 2014. "[J. Ralph] invited me down to his studio in Chinatown and showed me the film, which devastated me, and then he said, 'would you write a song with this musical setting I’ve done?'" Sting told Deadline. "I said, 'I don’t think I can. It's too devastating.'" But the song's central metaphor came to him later that evening after he showed the film to his wife. "I gave it to Josh the next day," Sting remembered. "He said, 'You're supposed to make this look hard.'"
Here is the song followed by a few interviews Sting gave about how the song came to be.