Background
The song was recorded on a night when Wyman had shown up to the studio and found that the session had been cancelled. Feeling frustrated that he had potentially wasted time in driving to the studio, engineer Glyn Johns asked him if he had anything that he'd like to record. "...I'd been messing with this song. It was a bit... what I thought was kind of spacy, you know... a bit kind of Satanic Majesties-like. And psychedelic in a way."
Lyrically, Wyman stated that "The idea for the song is about this guy who wakes up from a dream and finds himself in another dream." The song describes events that transpire in a dreamlike state:
| “ | We walked across the sand And the sea and the sky and the castles were blue I stood and held your hand And the spray flew high and the feathers floated by I stood and held your hand |
” |
Johns showed the song to singer Mick Jagger, and guitarists Keith Richards and Brian Jones who all liked it and decided to include it on the record.
The musicians on the song are Wyman on lead vocals and bass, Small Faces vocalist Steve Marriott on 12-string acoustic guitar and backing vocals, Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces on backing vocals, Brian Jones on electric organ and backing vocals, Nicky Hopkins on harpsichord and piano, Charlie Watts on drums, with Jagger and Richards adding backing vocals at a later stage of the recording.
At the conclusion of the track as heard on the album, Wyman himself can be heard snoring. He was unaware this had been tagged onto his song until he first played the completed album. He learned later that one night when he had fallen asleep in the studio, Jagger and Richards miked him up and recorded him snoring, and stuck it onto his track as a joke. This does not appear on the single.
Read more about this topic: In Another Land
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