Songfacts®:

• Eurythmics often put conflicting messages in their songs, reflecting how our worldview can shift based on how we're feeling and what's going on around us. In their breakout hit "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)," for example, much of the song deals with people who want to use you and bring you down, but it's laced with an optimism as well: "Keep your head up - movin' on."
  
  "I Saved The World Today" is another one of their songs with mixed messages.
  
  "It's very ironic," Dave Stewart of Eurythmics said in a Songfacts interview. "Another one of those song where people go hooray! but it's not saying that, it's saying, if only."
  
  "It's a very uplifting chorus but the verses are down musically," he added. "In the lyric it's all the way through saying, well, there's all these problems and there's a million things to solve, but hey, I saved the world today."
• Most people didn't spend much time on the internet in 1999 when this song was released, but there was still plenty of information overload, mostly in the form of 24-hour TV news channels. This song reflects that feeling, which became far more acute decades later when our phones became news feeds.
  
  "People face so many ridiculous mental problems every day as soon as you wake up," Dave Stewart told Songfacts. "At some point, your mind puts blinkers on things a bit because you can't cope with all that information and it can't cope with all the negative possibilities."
• "I Saved The World Today" is the first single from Peace, the last Eurythmics album and first since "We Too Are One" 10 years earlier. In the interim, singer Annie Lennox launched a successful solo career and Dave Stewart did a lot of songwriting with other artists, including Jon Bon Jovi ("Midnight in Chelsea") and Shakespears Sister ("Stay").
• Dave Stewart directed the video, which shows he and Lennox performing amid an orchestra. There's also a scene where world leaders converge to sign a treaty, but when the ink spills, they call it off and walk away. It's shot on the same set with the same orchestra as the next single, "17 Again." The plan was to do videos with the controversial photographer Richard Avedon, but that fell through so Stewart had to put the two videos together on short notice.