Say what you want about Sting (pompous middle-aged sellout), but the guy can write a good pop song. However, many of the songs he wrote with the Police were extremely dark. The song Murder by Numbers, which can be found on the CD version of Synchronicity but not the LP, is about what it would be like to be a serial killer: "Because murder is like anything you take to/It’s a habit-forming need for more and more". The song Once Upon a Daydream, the b-side of Synchronicity II, contains these lyrics: "Once her daddy found out/He threw her to the floor/He killed her unborn baby/And kicked me from the door/Once upon a nightmare/I bought myself a gun/I blew her daddy's brains out/Now hell has just begun". Hey, lighten up Sting! Even the mega hit Every Breath You Take was fairly dark. It was on the radio constantly in 1983 and it's basically a song about a stalker.
All of these songs were from roughly the same time period: when the Police were breaking up and Sting was going through a divorce, hence the dark lyrics. But it was also the most successful and prolific point for the Police, if not for Sting's entire career. In a May 1996 interview with Live! Magazine, Sting was quoted as saying, "Anyway, during that period with the Police, the most successful time of my life, I was suicidal. My first marriage and my relationship with the other members of the band was collapsing. I just felt adrift. I was manic-depressive and I just wasn't chemically balanced enough to enjoy it. I was out to lunch."
Perhaps my favorite dark Sting song, Shadows in the Rain, came from 3 years earlier on the Zenyatta Mondatta album:
Woke up in my clothes again this morning
Don't know exactly where I am
And I should heed my doctor's warning
He does the best with me he can
He claims I suffer from delusions
Yet I'm so confident I'm sane
It can't be no optical illusion
So how can you explain
Shadows in the rain
Clearly a song about someone on the verge of insanity or at least "suffering from delusions". However, Sting once introduced the song with the following quote: "When I was young I used to help my Dad on the milkround in Wallsend, and we used to get up at four in the morning and there was nobody around and I used to imagine what it would be like with no people, like if they dropped the bomb on Newcastle, we'd all be Shadows In The Rain...." The 'shadows' are almost certainly a reference to the infamous Hiroshima shadows. Either way it's some pretty dark territory. Sting rerecorded this song for his 1985 solo album and wrote in the liner notes that "Woke up in my clothes again this morning" would be a fitting epitaph for his headstone.
Stay tuned next time when I'll tell you about the most underrated pop/rock singer/songwriter ever . . .
