The 1967 song Sting called a massive musical achievement: “Wonderful”
Sting has spent his entire career looking for surprises in music.
The entire point of every one of his songs is to serve up something strange that no one has heard before, and even if he was going well outside of his territory, he would have rather made songs that appealed to him than trying to go down the same musical rabbit hole again. But he felt that some of the best pop songs were the ones that were able to do something original while keeping the same kind of musical setup every single time.
A band like AC/DC was definitely a bit too ho-hum for what he would want to do with his career, but he could definitely see what some of his biggest inspirations were going for. The Beatles always had more than a few twists and turns on their albums, and when you listen to those first Police albums, Sting was trying to do the same thing with a song like ‘Roxanne’ storming out of the speakers.
On paper, there’s nothing all that flashy going on in the song, but the way that he sings the song and his overall approach to the melody is what kept people moving. Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were already setting the foundation, but hearing him weave together a melody from more sophisticated chords wasn’t usually what was happening in the general punk regime of the time.
But rock and roll was only one facet of what Sting wanted to do. He had the idea of dreaming bigger than his genre, and while everyone would say that he belongs in the adult contemporary genre, it was about more than hanging out with the best jazzers of the time. He wanted to create a feeling, and no one seemed to capture emotion better than the greatest R&B musicians of the time.
Stevie Wonder was already a god in his eyes, but some of the greatest musicians in that field didn’t have to come from Motown. Aretha Franklin had been able to level virtually any crowd that she sang in front of, but if it weren’t for Otis Redding, Franklin wouldn’t have had her biggest hit with ‘Respect’. Redding was willing to get the most out of his voice that he could on every song, but ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’ is still one of the finest odes to loneliness that he ever made.
Any soul musician knows how to write a good heartache song, but Sting marvelled at the fact that Redding used only major chords to create a song like this, saying, “I went to my record store and bought ‘Dock Of The Bay’ on the Stax label. There was a lovely blue label, there was a paper bag, and I took it out, put it on my turntable, the usual ritual. I put the needle on it, and I hear (imitates the song’s intro). What a wonderful song. I mean, a sad, sad song but without any minor chords. It’s all major chords, which is kind of an achievement in many ways.”
But that’s because not all songs get their sense of loneliness from the minor chords they put into every song. Minor is typically considered sad in many respects, but even if you don’t have any of those chords in there, it’s all about how you deliver the song, and you can tell that Redding has a lot of loneliness in his heart, to the point where you can virtually picture him with his feet hanging off the dock and whistling to himself at the end of the tune.
It wasn’t doing anything complicated, but sometimes the songs that surprise you aren’t the ones that have everything and the kitchen sink in there. Less can always be more in the right circumstance, and Sting felt that no one was able to touch the kind of brilliance that Redding was working with.
