The songs Sting said no one could argue with: “There was no contest”
The Police had a problem that a lot of bands wish they had: too many good ideas.
Striking the balance between objectivity and subjectivity in a band is one of the most difficult things a musician has to do. Naturally, you’re always going to think that the songs you write and the music you’ve put together are superior. However, when you have band members who are also writing music, they have exactly the same opinion in relation to their own work, so what do you do?
In an interview with Far Out, Julie Dawson, the lead singer of NewDad, spoke about how, when making music, any kind of selfishness needs to be left at the door. When talking about the band’s album Altar, she said that a lot of the members of the group had ideas, and they needed to ensure everyone in the band had a voice to ensure those ideas came to be represented on the record.
“There’s no place for ego when you’re creating music,” she said, “You can’t have something in there because you want to be the one playing it, it’s not about that. It’s about what makes the song the best possible version of the song, so there’s definitely no room for ego when it comes to creating music.”
This is the mindset that every band needs to nurture, but when you’re in a group with ever-expanding egos, it can be hard to set them aside. This is the issue that The Police had, as they were constantly being forced to cut songs out of albums, but no band member wanted to give up their own. They would turn up to recording sessions with an excess of tracks, but then wouldn’t know what to do with all of them.
“The first part of doing a Police album involved deciding what songs we were going to use, which was always a painful, nerve-racking process, because 30 songs are brought to a session and only ten can be used on an album,” said Sting, “It took a certain amount of diplomacy and cruelty, plus objectivity, to decide what the numbers would be.”
While picking what songs are right for the album may have led to a few disagreements between band members, there were occasional exceptions to this rule. There are some songs out there which are absolute no-brainers, regardless of who wrote them, like some songs by The Police, which simply needed to be included on a record. They always stood out the most prominently, and each band member knew that they had a hit on their hands.
“You have to ask the other members of the group,” said Sting, “That’s what I thought about my own work. I mean, when everyone heard ‘Message in a Bottle’, there was no contest, really”.
He continued, “You don’t argue with ‘Message in a Bottle’, you don’t argue with ‘Walking on the Moon’, ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’: they are hit songs, and they are hit songs as soon as you hear them, no matter who wrote them.”
