Songfacts®:

• Pain is rather unpleasant, but it can be quite a motivator. This song doesn't deal with physical pain, but the emotional kind, often caused by a breakup.
  
  In a 2018 interview with Joan Armatrading, she told Songfacts: "'No More Pain' is about, in the end, saying, Okay, that's the situation, it's up to me now to decide, am I going to live in that pain, whatever that pain is, or am I going to say, 'Snap of it, you have the power to do something different?' Because you have the power to make those changes and you don't have to stay in certain states. You can get yourself out of it.
  
  I know people might listen and think, 'Oh, yeah, of course you can, everything's really easy,' but I do believe that you can talk yourself into things, and in a positive way. Most of my songs are very positive. Throughout my career they tend to be very positive."
• Armatrading refers to pain as her "protection" in this song. "Pain sometimes can be like a warning," she explained. "The line says, 'This pain is my protection, it tells me to run.' Well, sometimes, if you don't feel that pain, you won't know that you've got to get out of there. You've got to feel this thing to know whether you should fly. Fight or flight. You need to have that to know where you are sometimes."
• Not Too Far Away is Armatrading's 21st album. She did all the production, engineering, writing and instrumentation herself on the set, including the drum programming.