Songfacts®:

• On Marillion.com, lead singer Steve Hogarth describes this track as the "Problem Child" of the album. The band wrote the track, but couldn't come up with a good set of lyrics. So Hogarth went to Barbados to work on it with his friend Nick Van Eede, who is the lead singer and primary songwriter of Cutting Crew. Says Hogarth: "On day four he sent us all out for the evening and descended to the basement with Marillion's backing track and a bottle of whisky. When I returned he said he'd hatched a couple of ideas and we worked through them. On one of his many sheets of paper he'd written the words 'Map of the World' and I suggested we try this somehow as a chorus. On the fly he came up with the melody, and I moved it to coincide with a different part of the musical idea. This was the key that, at last, unlocked the song for me and I took everything back to England and started again."
• Nick Van Eede told us about why he went to Barbados: "I reached a point in my career when I was solely writing for Sony publishing and also managing a band (MIR) in Canada and it just seemed obvious that I did not need to live anywhere in particular so within three months of my decision I was living in a beautiful big home on the east coast of Barbados in St. Philip... one cane field away from Eddie Grant and his studio. It was a privilege to live amongst the grinning souls of that gorgeous island for four years. My daughter did some serious growing up there and I certainly learnt to take things a little slower. Also wrote a really cool song called 'Map of the world' with my old mate Steve Hogarth for Marillion."