"Secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street, but all he ever thinks to do is watch."
1: Synchronicity II, The Police, 1983
I knew this was my favorite song the first time I heard it. The Police already were (and still are, and will probably always be) my favorite music act, this tune sealed it.
I know someone upthread wrote they don't pay attention to Sting's lyrics. I think when he's not being completely pretentious and dropping names, he writes some of the best lyrics around. And this one is line after line of killer phrases, any one of which a lyricist would count themselves lucky to have written in a song. You're left to wonder what's more frightening - the lochness monster finally emerging from its lake and maybe wrecking havoc on whatever is around up there, or the guy coming home to his family and finally letting loose. To me it's the latter. To this day I wonder how Sting could nail the frustration of ineffectual meaningless middle class drones - he never lived that life. Maybe it's based on his father, though I don't think he spent much time in an office setting either. But nail it he did. I could see this in my own father from time to time. I told myself back then I was never going to go out that way. And now, here I am, grinding away. I like to think I don't get this dark, but sometimes I definitely feel like a lemming packed into a shiny metal box.
Sting's bass is direct, driving, relentless, yet still varied, providing the dark brooding tension of the song. Andy Summers, what can you say about this track? He gets sounds out of the guitar I didn't know you could make. He and Robert Fripp had collaborated prior to this, and it seems to me that Summers is letting that experience inform a lot of his sound here for some of the guitar parts. I'm not usually a fan of doubling the bass and guitar lines (often just lazy and uncreative), but here Sting and Andy come together between verse lyrics in a powerful way, then split off again to call and answer each other - some genius songwriting there. Eventually the song leads to its climax and then mayhem is unleashed "many miles away" - the guitar implying some of the violence that ensues, as Summers does some crazy stuff to close out the song.
Stewart Copeland. My favorite drummer of all time. Honorable mentions to Billy Cobham, Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield, Dave Garibalidi, John Bonham, Alan Dawson, Rick Marotta, Bernard Purdie, Terry Bozzio, Matt Cameron, Louie Bellson and Derrick McKenzie. Probably some others I'm forgetting right now. Omar Hakim and Tony Thompson tie for 2nd. Stewart is the man. He's the reason I started playing. Nobody sounds like him, though many have tried. He has all the chops, but he has the musicality too. He knows space, he knows less is right much more often than you think. He pretty much always makes the right decision every chance he gets in his playing, and still manages to make it creative and distinctive. And by the time this album came around, he and his engineers had created an all timer rock drum sound.
On this one, what he chooses to play makes the sound seem slower than it actually is. And the "trick" by which he accomplishes that is so simple - leave out the bass drum every other measure. He creates space that actually makes the song feel like its barely hanging on to the explosive snare beats on the 2 and 4. Then when he puts the bass back in on every measure the song gets kicked into another gear. Another great feature are the choked cymbal accents he throws in there, again playing with the feel of the space of the song. He uses a gong bass overdub to add occasional low end bombs for accent down there too. Then, when the closing mayhem is unleashed he lays into his china crash to give you the feel of monsters rending everything in their path combined with his distinctive ride/bell patterns and accents. It's an all time drum track, and as much as I hate to do the appeal to authority thing, it's widely recognized in the community as an all time drum track, so you don't have to just take my word for it.
Thanks to Stewart Copeland for all these years of joy and inspiration.
Roughly six years and five albums. They never officially closed the door, but you got the idea when Sting released Dream Of The Blue Turtles. It was sad at the time to know it was over. Looking back though, it probably was the best way for it to go. Every album is great, their sound changing with each release, everyone else trying to catch up to them in the meantime. They split up because they wouldn't compromise on their musical ideas, which is what made the band so great in the first place. They went out on top. I can't really think of a better way to end it.
You've listed one of my top 10 and a few more that will rank highly. And then some that will be on the low side, but that's just because the Beatles made a ridiculous amount of great music, not because I don't like anything on your list (I think they're all great). As an example that I think won't be much of a spoiler, Maxwell's Silver Hammer is quite low for me but I really enjoy that song and love to listen to it each time it comes on; it just doesn't get there for me as much as others do. Your list in super-interesting and varied! My thread will be (I hope) a discussion of Beatles songs and not so much about what I like the best.
