For the month of October, I’m selecting a song each day from the decade that has the most meaning to me: the 80s. It was the decade that I grew up in. The period of time where I discovered my love for music — and explored many different genres. For the next 31 days, I’ll highlight a handful of songs that I truly loved and that were representative of the decade. #31DaysOf80sSongs
There’s rock. There’s reggae. And then there’s The Police. No other band blended the two worlds together better than Sting, Summers and Copeland. They took all the best elements of both and bended them into these fantastic forms that were both extremely fun and extremely smart. While trios like Rush and Muse have made a name for themselves with the amount of sound they created from three guys, The Police made a name for themselves by working in space. A perfect example of this is “Driven to Tears”.
It may not be my favorite Police song (that distinction belongs to “Synchronicity II”), but “Driven to Tears” is a song that I have serious respect for structurally and stylistically. Along with reggae-infused sound, it seems to have a jazz mentality with its percussion style and emphasis on giving individual instruments their moment in the spotlight. Summers’ guitar solo at the 1:40 mark feels improvised and hardly on the nose. Copeland plays more like Max Roach than a traditional rock drummer with a heavy emphasis on the cymbals. And Sting wields note repetitions, arpeggios and space on his bass guitar. On “Driven to Tears”, the pregnant pauses further the song along as much as the notes do.
“My comfortable existence is reduced to a shallow meaningless party.”