“I can’t explain”: The one song Sting called the most generic thing he wrote
Any seasoned musician is not going to want to make the same kind of blasé rock and roll song whenever they get to the studio. They have the chops that anyone else would have killed for, and if they spend their time only pumping out the base-level chords that everyone’s heard a thousand times, it’s going to get boring really fast. And while Sting is more than happy to make a decent pop song when he wants to, he wishes that some of his songs didn’t get the kind of attention they ended up getting.
When listening to some of The Police’s best work, Sting was always a master of doing a lot with a little. There’s hardly anything fancy going on in the melody of a song like ‘Walking on the Moon’, but that gives a lot more room for Andy Summers to create an entire landscape of sound with the different effects on his guitar.
As soon as the band started making steps into the mainstream, there was always a handful of tunes that catered towards the pop market a little more. A tune like ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ may have been contentious among the band members, but the reason why everyone flocks to it is because it’s one of the most inventive pop songs they’ve ever made, complete with a sing-along chorus and a strange calypso-style rhythm.
By the time of Synchronicity, though, the band had seemed to make music that went beyond their imaginations. They couldn’t stand each other when making the record, but when a song like ‘Every Breath You Take’ eventually took off and became one of the most heard songs of the decade, the only way to preserve their legacy was to retire instead of turning into the bitter old men in a band that used to be good.
And for Sting, the choice to go solo meant moving as far away from traditional pop as he could. There were always going to be brilliant melodies in his tunes, but from Dream of the Blue Turtles to Ten Summoner’s Tales, there was also a good helping of jazz in a lot of his material, especially when he brought in someone like Dominic Miller to help flesh out his band on his later work.
But no matter where he went, ‘Every Breath You Take’ would always be a few paces behind him, which frustrated him to no end, saying, “The ones that come quickly have already been written somewhere else. You just compile them. If you take, say, ‘Every Breath You Take’, which is probably my most successful song, it wrote itself. It’s completely generic – a rhyming dictionary come to life. Yet there’s something compelling about it that I can’t explain.”
It is a bit commonplace for Sting to use the same doo-wop style chords that have been used a thousand times, but as evidenced by the song’s success, cliches exist for a reason. There’s a certain yearning quality in how the tune is played, and while that may have been a bit alarming since the song is about a crazed lover stalking his prey, the music makes it all go down a little bit easier.
‘Every Breath You Take’ may have earned its spot as one of the finest pop tunes of the 1980s, but considering what Sting has in his back catalogue, there’s not as much room to mess with the arrangements on a track like this. A song like ‘Demolition Man’ is a living, breathing composition whenever he plays it today, but it’s hard to mess around with a song that most people have let into their hearts in an intimate way.
