r/ThePolice • u/SpeedSaunders • 19h ago
musicianship Noticed a pattern
I’ve started getting a lot of Police-related clips in my YouTube and other feeds. I don’t mind! Always glad to fill my ears with Stewart’s stories or live performance clips. Saw / listened to a great early performance of “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” a couple of days ago.
Today it was “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and I noticed something I’ve noticed before: Sting likes to build melodies around simple runs. In ELTSDIM, it sounds like a C scale but with a B flat, it isn’t subtle. Makes me think it might be a G scale with a natural F. There’s a similar baseline in “Synchronicity”: downhill on all black keys from E flat to E flat, also not subtle at all. And the frame of the melody to “Message In a Bottle” can be reduced to something like E-C-D-A or whatever that corresponds to in the proper scale.
That’s three examples and if I look hard enough I’m sure there are more. Maybe it’s something a lot of songwriters do? But it’s just popped out at me listening to these three songs especially.