#20greatsongs — Public Fediverse posts

20 Great Neko Case Songs 

Neko Case’s music is a keen blade. The deep and enduring love of humanity is on one edge. Outrage in the face of our cruel histories and tendencies is on the other. Her songs are rooted in the conviction that we could do so much better, surrounded by natural wonders and possibilities of which we are all a part and connected, if only we could see it. The human spirit in such a world in all its sublime and terrifying complexity is too big to contain in any capacity, let alone in one easily labelled genre. And what a voice hers is to convey its violent beauty. 

To illustrate the depth and breadth of her artistry, here are 20 great Neko Case songs to drop oneself into and walk around as one would in a fully realized landscape. As each one makes slender cuts to the senses in tales of love and cruelty, anger and empathy, considerations of how those forces so often take up the same spaces in a heart become painfully and joyfully apparent. 

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Timber 

After stints in Vancouver B.C. punk bands Miaow and Cub in the early-to-mid Nineties, Neko Case went down another stylistic avenue on her 1997 solo debut The Virginian. Case embraced her Patsy Cline instincts, complete with an appropriated twang. But she didn’t forget her punk energy evident on this cut, albeit channeled into the sound of Sixties-era country music.  

The metaphor of a planted tree and its ultimate fall due to unnurtured love is true to the that tradition’s songwriting form. But it would also provide an early glimpse into Case’s fascination with human affinities to the natural world, with us being as much a part of the landscape as any fallen tree. With Her Boyfriends backing band laying down an energetic country shuffle, that’s never more than a suggestion as it sits perfectly at home in your local honky tonk’s jukebox. 

Listen: Timber 

South Tacoma Way 

On 2000’s Furnace Room Lullaby, Neko Case delves deeper into more personal territory. “South Tacoma Way” is an evocation of childhood memories of hometowns, coupled with the melancholy that comes in revisiting them as an adult. The subjects of grief and of leaving things (and people) behind is, as always, open-ended. It’s the images as they’re tied to emotions that mean the most here, a familiar characteristic in Case’s material. 

“South Tacoma Way” trades in polaroid snapshots of friendship, loss, and mourning as a world once remembered fades away. The song’s melody and changes carry a story that’s less a pop music construction and more like an impressionistic indie film. The music is spacious and echoey in support of Case’s reflective vocal as emotional landscapes meet physical geography. We listeners are witness to them becoming bittersweetly entwined. 

Listen: South Tacoma Way 

Furnace Room Lullaby 

Filled with mournful murder ballad violence and regret, this song lives in the eerie stillness after the grisly deed is done. “Furnace Room Lullaby” is a story of a woman’s desperation and the lengths to which she goes to save herself from her oppressor, only to be oppressed in turn by the weight of her deed. This is older, weirder country music; the kind that wafts up through the floorboards as the furnace rumbles below. 

Case’s voice delivers the drama here as always as she captures the sound of a soul caught in a choice between two terrible realities – living with a throne on her chest, or with the punishing guilt when she refuses that burden. The story ties it to established folk traditions. But there are contemporary implications here as well, with so many women similarly caught today. 

Listen: Furnace Room Lullaby 

Deep Red Bells 

Written in response to missing women and violence in the Pacific Northwest, “Deep Red Bells” featured on Neko Case’s third album, 2002’s Blacklisted, is full of outrage and sadness. The song is not concerned with specific events so much as with the lingering effects that violence toward marginalized women has on the collective psyche – and what it says about the human lives we value, and about those we don’t.  

Musically, the song evokes the same burnished nocturnal quality that will go on to mark her output hereafter. The low guitar leads and pedal steel riding on brushed snare accompany the lyrical balance between anger and compassion. The titular bells toll for those lost on the highway, but also for those who remain in a world where it’s so easy to cast women’s lives aside as acceptable losses. 

Listen: Deep Red Bells 

I Wish I Was the Moon 

A highpoint on Blacklisted, “I Wish I Was the Moon” explores the loneliness and weariness of feeling trapped in one’s own life, wishing to be set apart from a merciless world if only for a while. The narrator’s story suggests the betrayal of empty promises, and good things turned bad as time steals youth away. It’s an interior monologue of all-too common spiritual desolation and longing told with uncommon pathos and sensitivity. 

Case’s delicately strummed acoustic guitar as a counterbalance to her keening voice is joined by pedal steel, accordion, bass, and drums that come in as if in a supportive embrace. As lyrics evoke images of distance and coldness, the music makes the song sound as warm as the light from a midnight candle burning in a window. In its seeming despair, the song’s resonance brings compassionate relief. 

Listen: I Wish I Was the Moon 

These Are the Fables 

While she built a concurrent solo career, Neko Case formed Vancouver-based The New Pornographers with bandmate A.C. Newman, a songwriter and musician remarkably sympatico with Case’s own approach to impressionistic non-linear lyrics and clear-eyed melodic intent. Case’s lead on Newman’s song from 2005’s Twin Cinema that focuses on imagery and emotional resonance is a sterling example of how her vocals bring his words and melody to life.  

“These Are the Fables” is colourful and textural, with fantastical visions that suggest the wonderment and complexity of fine details in single moments; mythical and elemental images that suggest transcendence even amid the mundane and predictable. It demonstrates Case’s artistic versatility, rooted in Sixties psychedelia as it meets with Twenty-first century art rock. Within that mix, she’s in full command of an expansive stylistic range beyond any one genre.  

Listen: These Are the Fables 

Hold On, Hold On 

Featured on the acclaimed 2006 record Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, “Hold On, Hold On” proves Neko Case to be a songwriter of keen insight on the subject of internal turmoil. A woman leaves a wedding reception, valium in hand as given to her by the bride. With these few details come the suggestion that an unpleasant scene unfolded just before, unleashing a tide of harsh self-reflection.  

The jangly folk-rock sound communicates the turbulent minor chord emotions behind Case’s lead. The song is illustrative of one who cannot thrive in the traditional world from which she seeks escape, tired of waiting to feel like her friends do about love and stability. The hold on, hold on is the song’s catchy refrain, but is also the insistent, hectoring one that the narrator wishes to expunge from her mind and heart for good. 

Listen: Hold On, Hold On 

Star Witness 

Concerning a confrontation with death, “Star Witness” is more fulsomely a love song, too. The connection between love and death is inextricable, with one tying us to the world and each other while the other takes people out of it and sometimes very suddenly. This leaves those who remain to wonder why. In this, we’re all star witnesses compelled to make sense out of senselessness. 

For such heavy subject matter, the music is delightfully light with Case’s beloved reverbed guitar echoing in a decidedly nocturnal world. Even her voice is winsome and airy as she sings the vividly lurid lyrics of glass in her thermos, blood on her jeans, and wolves around town tonight. The strings, backing vocals, and outro piano sound as if they’re descending from heaven as the lyrics scrabble in the blood-soaked earth. The contrast is masterful. 

Listen: Star Witness 

Maybe Sparrow 

There is a certain helplessness in the knowledge that one can’t keep another completely safe in an unpredictable world. “Maybe Sparrow” captures the essence of this in a world full of innocents who too often fly into territories for which they are not prepared. The natural world in its beauty and danger makes an appearance here, an enduring metaphor to the uncertainty of life found in Neko Case’s work.  

This richly arranged song features Garth Hudson of The Band adding colourful filigrees on the organ. The jangling acoustic guitar voices the rapidly beating heart of the titular sparrow fleeing in vain from diving hawks. Case’s “la di da” is a cry of sorrow and frustration in the face of cold realities as compassion for another’s fate without the power to alter it becomes less a virtue and more of a burden.  

Listen: Maybe Sparrow 

This Tornado Loves You 

Taken from 2009’s elementally-titled Middle Cylone, “This Tornado Loves You” is a unique love song that is quite literally all-consuming and full of grand gestures one dare not refuse. Is this the voice of a would-be lover in single-minded pursuit and damn the consequences? Or is it about how vulnerable human beings really are in the face of nature’s unpredictable fury? Given the choice, what difference would it really make? 

Case displays her ability to uniquely synthesize musical ingredients, supplementing the brushed drums and low-twang guitars with plucked strings and helicopter rhythms that whirl like deadly weather systems. Yet it is also crystalline in its sonic detail, belying the violence of broken necks that line the ditch, and making the invitation to run out to meet me, come into the light frighteningly compelling even if it spells doom. 

Listen: This Tornado Loves You 

People Got a Lot of Nerve 

Neko Case explores the themes of autonomy and nature on this single from Middle Cyclone. The music takes us on a jangly folk-rock flight of fancy featuring killer whales in tanks and incarcerated elephants. “People Got a Lot of Nerve” is about captivity and the common expectation that animals and humans alike should only exist to meet our expectations even at cost to their agency and true nature.  

In this, people have indeed got a lot of nerve, imposing unrealistic, presumptive, hard-coded, and downright cruel limitations on the natural world and on each other, our single-mindedness leading to pain and suffering all around. Full of ringing 12-string guitars that sound like the sun coming out, the sober subject matter becomes musically joyful, operating on multiple levels lyrically as animal captives kept in cages and tanks mirror our own imprisonment. 

Listen: People Got a Lot of Nerve 

Magpie to the Morning 

Once again, the natural world is the higher power in a song about venturing into the light when the world of night seems endless. Yet as always in Neko Case’s songwriting world, the night isn’t all bad. There are still songs to keep us company well before dawn as we crave the comfort of daylight, however fleeting that comfort may be. 

Case’s voice on this is both ruminative and insistent as she sings about being in the moment, reminded by the local corvids to not let fading summer pass her by. And yet “Magpie to the Morning” suggests how easy it is to let that happen while we dwell in dark places. In addition to the Middle Cyclone version, a stripped-down dobro and banjo bonus track version on her next record makes it sound, wonderfully, much older than it actually is. 

Listen: Magpie to the Morning | Magpie to the Morning (outtake) 

Man 

A stunning barrage of fuzzy, Sixties-influenced indie rock, “Man” is a ferocious single taken from 2013’s The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. This is a tune about what’s allowed to one gender and denied to others; authority, ownership, credit, and equal reward in a world created primarily by men and with men primarily in mind. This is a reclamation of manhood, putting the “man” back in human where it belongs. 

“Man” is propelled by Case’s clarion vocal in a song of defiance that declares what’s true—that freedom means wielding the power to define oneself and one’s own life while allowing the same for everyone. Case makes an artistic statement about who gets to do that and who is defined as the default human within artificial, rigid hierarchies designed to keep things as they’ve been defined, not necessarily how they are. 

Listen: Man 

City Swans 

Another driving pop-oriented tune from The Worse Things Get … record, “City Swans” recalls her work with the New Pornographers as it meets with her own brand of roots-meets-art rock. This is an aural film about a night out on the town and the attempts to capture what it is we admire in another while finding out something about ourselves in the process.  

The song is both anthemic and introspective, full of reverence and a kind of amourous disorientation while touching on insecurity. These are part and parcel of connecting with others, particularly after putting in miles on personal odometers with dings in the sides to prove them. This is a song of well-earned experience. But there is a touch of lingering innocence here, too, in being surprised by something new after thinking one has seen everything.  

Listen: City Swans 

Night Still Comes 

A deeply harrowing, musically rewarding rumination, “Night Still Comes” is an acknowledgement of what the inside of chronic depression is like, plagued by dark urges that cannot be understood or countermanded from the outside. This is a song of struggle, its narrator engaged in chemical warfare with their own brain, that same creative center producing so much beauty and sense of selfhood having become a betrayer.  

“Night Still Comes” is a song about that which is impossible to accept or dismiss, never soothed even by the most loving forces in our lives. The song rests on a waltz rhythm, its tone working against that traditionally airy and open form. Its chorus is both catchy and heartbreaking; the cry of one isolated by illness, feeling out of reach as a veil of night not fully expressible or understood separates them from the world.  

Listen: Night Still Comes 

Supermoon 

In 2016, Neko Case put out a record with k.d. lang and Laura Veirs under their last names, reviewed at the time as an alt-folk answer to the Harris/Parton/Ronstadt Trio albums. The result was not the close three-part harmonies associated with those previous albums. It was more of a distillation of what each songwriter and singer is great at, all on one record. 

Written against Laura Veirs’ melody, “Supermoon” is starkly arranged, with k.d. lang’s distinctive backing vocal floating behind it among the weeping, lilting strings. The low guitar that’s a mainstay in Case’s solo work is in place supplementing her lyrics that explore humanity’s exploitative relationship to nature, driven by a pathological need for control. The result is sobering in a song about dominance over our environment instead of engagement with it, to the cost of our own souls. 

Listen: Supermoon 

Bad Luck 

From 2018’s Hell-On, “Bad Luck” explores the liminal space between the power we have and our vulnerability to forces that render us powerless. “Bad Luck” took on special resonance after a housefire disrupted Case’s life while she was away recording the album in Sweden. It was as if the event and the sentiment of the song were eerie reflections of each other which is not an ideal way to prove a thesis. 

Musically, the song injects a compelling Motown-style feel into subject matter that otherwise should sound morose. Instead, it’s undeniably celebratory. Its jubilant, layered vocals are anthemic for all who are subject to forces we cannot control. When things go wrong, it’s only because they’re bound to do so eventually. This makes “Bad Luck” a vehicle to remove fear, judgement, and self-loathing, becoming an unexpected comfort to us instead. 

Listen: Bad Luck 

The Halls of Sarah 

Neko Case provides an authoritative voice on “Halls of Sarah”, a tune concerning a facet of oppression and exploitation that’s subtle and therefore more dangerous. It’s the impulses some men follow to make a woman into his muse or source of power, doing so without her consent or ceding territory to her in return. The song suggests misplaced senses of ownership, false connection, and other destructive perceptions that weigh down and dehumanize women. 

The lilting acoustic guitar kicking the song off is coupled with a less-expected baritone saxophone lurking behind it. The sonic landscape is beautifully wintry and overcast with the undercurrent of voices that make it uplifting somehow, too. There’s anger here. But it’s mostly overlaid by sorrow, compassionate to the plight of anyone caught up in the grinding gears of someone else’s ambitions, entitlements, or senses of comfort. 

Listen: The Halls of Sarah 

Oh, Shadowless 

A new song on 2022’s Wild Creatures compilation, “Oh Shadowless” is a Lennoneque nocturne that trades in pleasant musical surprises – shifts in tone and tempo that keep us on our toes, exploring a tempestuous psychedelia-flavoured instrumental section before returning to the lullaby-like main melody. This is a late-night half-awake musing during the still wee hours when one can’t seem to fall asleep. 

As much as her work provokes one’s thinking about challenging subject matter, this one is a reminder that Neko Case’s music is just as much about the comfort that we’re all in this together as it is about struggle. The enormity of nature and the universe is present here, as always. But her voice, capable of embodying a tornado when needed, is dulcet and soothing as she sends us off for the good night’s sleep that eludes her. 

Listen: Oh, Shadowless 

Winchester Mansion of Sound

Combining a kind of East meets West melodic sensibility, this cut from 2025’s Neon Grey Midnight Green is a love song to a departed musician, Flat Duo Jets’ Dexter Romweber—and if we think she’s talking about romance, we aren’t really listening as the song itself says. A bright and sparkling piano leads this song that pulls from memory, children’s rhyme (“Down Down Baby”), and Case’s appreciation for Robbie Basho’s operatic and similarly piano-led folk tune “Orphan’s Lament”.

The tune is a collage of imagery, in part a lament but also decidedly celebratory. In the end it sounds as if Neko Case is singing this in celebration of music itself and its power to unlock feelings and sensations that cannot be accessed any other way. In this, the song is a tune of immense gratitude, not only for music from beloved musicians, but also in being empowered and gifted to make it oneself.

Listen: Winchester Mansion of Sound 

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Runners-up and bubbling under: 

• Lonely Old Lies 

• Things That Scare Me 

• Mood to Burn Bridges 

• Pretty Girls 

• Lady Pilot 

• The Tigers Have Spoken 

• The Next Time You Say Forever 

• I’m an Animal 

• John Saw That Number 

• A Widow’s Toast 

• That Teenaged Feeling 

• Nearly Midnight Honolulu 

• Bracing for Sunday 

• Wild Creatures 

• Local Girl 

• Calling Cards 

• Down I-5 

• Gumball Blue 

• Oracle of the Maritimes 

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The emotional dance that one can hear in Neko Case’s music between rage, compassion, great sensitivity, wonder, and refusal of bullshit covers a range that rivals that of the musical territory she inhabits. At the center of it all is her voice, an extraordinary instrument by any measure and one that seems to harbour all of those states of mind and of heart that we all feel so keenly, yet can’t always find the words to express. 

You can learn more about Neko Case’s newest releases and news at nekocase.com. 

Last year, she put out an autobiography, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You. You can buy it here.

To read her more personal material and get previews of her work in progress, you can visit and sign up for her newsletter, Entering the Lung. 

Enjoy! 

20 Great Joe Jackson Songs

Joe Jackson kicked off his career from the mid-1970s as a classic outsider. He was not really a snotty punk, nor was he a classically chiseled rock god. Instead, he was gifted (or burdened) with formal training in musical theory and a keen ear for composition and intricate arrangements. Even so, Jackson found himself caught in the eddies of some prevalent musical movements when he started working live dates as a jobbing musician and bandmember, those being pub rock and its tagalong little brother London-based punk rock. 

The punk scene in particular turned its nose up at any hints of musical sophistication. But as a songwriter, Joe Jackson was deft enough to capture its energy into some deceptively intricate music that still remained highly accessible. Even contending with comparisons to the Stiff Records sound put forward in the press when he started, Joe Jackson carved out his own niche anyway. Over the decades, that niche was sometimes fashionable and sometimes not. But throughout, he always explored interesting angles wherever he could find them. To illustrate this, and to celebrate him as a unique songwriter and musician, here are 20 great Joe Jackson songs that span years, genres, and musical eras. 

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Is She Really Going Out with Him? 

Derived from the spoken word intro to The Damned’s “New Rose”, that phrase in turn borrowed from the Shangri-La’s’ “Leader of the Pack”, Joe Jackson’s first big hit on 1979’s Look Sharp! established his authorial voice as a man standing out of step with his surroundings. With Jackson’s piano taking a supporting role, his band crank out a punkish attack married to a Sixties girl group feel as Jackson’s sneer of a voice sings of pretty women walking with their attendant gorillas down his street. 

Listen: Is She Really Going Out with Him? 

Sunday Papers 

Always a social critic, Joe Jackson aims his ire at the salacious British press on this cut also from Look Sharp! perhaps unaware of how well his insights would retain their relevancy. With chopping ska-inspired guitar chords and stalwart Graham Maby’s exploratory and melodic basslines, the song telegraphs barbs of cutting sarcasm and irony at the shallowness of the press and those who believe every word they print, galvanizing a whole generation’s jaded attitude around mass media spectacle. 

Listen: Sunday Papers 

I’m the Man 

The title track of his second release of 1979, “I’m the Man” continues where “Sunday Papers” left off, this time considering society’s commoditization of everything you can name. Even the record’s cover reflects sentiments of a world littered with cheap salesmen, and another example of Jackson’s displaced perspectives of the world around him which would only deepen later on. Jackson’s band rip this one to shreds, particularly drummer Dave Houghton who tests the durability of his kit with notable ferocity. 

Listen: I’m the Man 

Friday 

Joe Jackson’s interest in jazz and pop intersections was in place even from the start of his recording career. Further evidence of this would emerge soon enough. Meanwhile, “Friday” features a tight new wave power-trio arrangement that deftly streaks down corridors of sophisticated, jazzy changes. This cut is just as ready for the pub crowd, inviting happy cheers from the crowd in a song about how aspirations, energy, and senses of self can so easily evaporate in nine-to-five drudgery. 

Listen: Friday 

On Your Radio 

A pop missive with compositional sophistication that still wears a skinny tie, Jackson’s “On Your Radio” finds the narrator kicking off the dust of past hardships suffered by a boy who couldn’t fit in, establishing his niche in a world where he’s finally found acceptance – on the radio. Jackson perfectly frames his voice on this cut – always distinct with a curled lip of disdain that you can practically hear. But the song’s joy outweighs its bitterness, even if the latter remains. 

Listen: On Your Radio 

Mad at You 

Jackson contemplated a drift away from new wave’s stylistic template by 1980’s Beat Crazy. “Mad at You” is a final statement from that first phase of his career, hitting all the marks of post-punk aggression with a distinct layer of self-awareness that may or may not include a parting shot to the new wave tag by being so on-the-nose. Graham Maby’s bass provides a rhythmic anchor with a primitive, insistent riff as Jackson lays down one of his rawest vocal performances, ironic or not.  

Listen: Mad at You 

Steppin’ Out 

A move to New York City inspired new approaches to composition and arrangements on 1982’s landmark Night & Day, even if themes of displacement and alienation remained. With his massive hit “Steppin’ Out”, it might take time to detect them, full as it is with stately grand piano vistas and a scrappy little drum machine now fully embracing a nocturnal world of jazz and mythical mid-century excursions. It carried a sense of wistful nostalgia even when the song was new. 

Listen: Steppin’ Out 

Breaking Us in Two 

Where “Mad at You” approached relationship troubles like a man with a hammer perceiving every problem as a nail, “Breaking Us in Two” is the more lyrically nuanced tune. Its narrator finds himself in a world that he must confront from the inside, rather than in one he’s free to criticize from without. This shift is notable for Jackson the songwriter. Besides that, it positioned Joe Jackson’s more dominant and superb piano as a refreshing sound on mainstream radio. 

Listen: Breaking Us in Two 

You Can’t Get What You Want (Until You Know What You Want) 

If Night & Day is the New York club date, then 1984’s Body & Soul is the Broadway show. A flagship song from that record, “You Can’t Get What You Want (Until You Know What You Want)” is an irony-free and brassy jazz-pop effusion. Even if Jackson’s voice seems built to convey wryness in everything he sings, he carries off the joy and optimism anyway with a life-affirming and fulsome arrangement that beams with enthusiasm to help take him there. 

Listen: You Can’t Get What You Want (Until You Know What You Want) 

Be My Number Two 

A story of a man trying to get back on his feet with someone new after a heartbreak, “Be My Number Two” is either a defiantly optimistic love song, or a tale of a man doomed to repeat his mistakes. Either way, it finds Jackson reaching new levels of nuance and emotional resonance. His simple and melodic piano lines in a song about how complicated love can be provide stark contrast, completed by an epic saxophone reprise and finish. 

Listen: Be My Number Two 

Home Town 

A native of Portsmouth, a seaside town in England, Jackson’s song about it featured on 1986’s Big World is a classic wistful lyric contrasted with an ebullient guitar-bass-drums arrangement. By the end of the Nineties in solo piano versions, Jackson ditched the ironic distance in favour of a genuine reflection on his own complex yet still affectionate relationship to the place in which he grew up, bringing out its charms as one of Jackson’s best compositions. 

Listen: Home Town (Big World Version) | Home Town (live version) 

Down to London 

Joe Jackson takes another tack on the theme of home towns in “Down to London”, a key track from 1989’s Blaze of Glory.  A kitchen sink tale of hopefuls trying to see over their limited horizons, the setting is a city of revolutionary artistic movements and lost souls in equal measure. Spiced with a Sixties pop flavour, this cut is a celebration and a warning in a story that’s as resonant now as it was since London was first founded. 

Listen: Down to London 

Me and You Against the World 

Ending the 1980s in a titular blaze of glory, “Me and You Against the World” is the sonic equivalent of youthful fervour to change the world through sheer force of will. Joe Jackson makes us feel that it’s all possible in this tune that features a towering arrangement of brass, call and response vocals, ringing guitars, and a singalong refrain. This cut sets the scene to preserving the belief that positive change is possible, applicable to any era. 

Listen: Me and You Against the World 

Stranger Than Fiction 

A bona-fide pop single with Sixties references suitable for a new decade on 1991’s Laughter & Lust, “Stranger Than Fiction” is adorned by organ, big backing vocals, and a cornucopia of percussion. This is a grown-up tale about how the details of life in their ordinariness can reveal profundity when you’re in love. This song in Jackson’s catalogue that distinguishes itself in its contentedness would be the last of its kind for a few years from here. 

Listen: Stranger Than Fiction 

Happyland 

Removing himself from the pop landscape for a while in the Nineties, Joe Jackson continued in his neo-classical composition explorations. By 2000, he’d revisit his complicated relationship with New York City, a theme found on his Night & Day album. “Happyland” is a gem from Night & Day II finding him blending all those elements with vivid imagery and wistfulness in equal measure. Its complex emotional profile matches its compositional sophistication in an affectionate song of memory, tragedy, and love. 

Listen: Happyland 

Still Alive 

Returning to the pop-rock fold by 2004, Joe Jackson gathered his original band together that joined him on his first three records. The appropriately-titled Volume 4 has Joe Jackson and his guys combining their unique dynamics with deeper poise that takes them beyond a straightforward nostalgia trip. “Still Alive” leans into a shared love of Sixties British guitar pop with patented irony reflected in the song’s title, played as it is by his old army buddies in a new century. 

Listen: Still Alive 

A Place in the Rain 

For 2008’s Rain, Jackson retains Graham Maby on bass and Dave Houghton on drums for a collection of pop songs arranged for a jazz trio who contrarily don’t play jazz at all. Jackson’s piano takes centre stage as he sings of taking deliberate measures to change one’s place and times. Perhaps, like Night & Day before it, these themes are driven by a move to a new city – this time Berlin. “A Place in the Rain” closes the record with a hopeful note, although decidedly under overcast skies. 

Listen: A Place in the Rain 

Rush Across the Road 

Like a burst of sunshine on the Rain album, “Rush Across the Road” can be easily viewed as an almost thirty-year follow-up to “Is She Really Going Out with Him”. It has the narrator seeing the pretty woman once knew (this time without her gorilla) walking down his street as a chance to redeem past resentments and embrace affection instead. This song is one Jackson’s most good-natured, reflective of how the years can banish old insecurities much easier than we ever thought they could. 

Listen: Rush Across the Road 

A Little Smile 

Joe Jackson did the rounds for 2015’s Fast Forward, recording in various cities and with equally varied line-ups of musicians. “A Little Smile” reflects Jackson’s skill at balancing shadows and light in his arrangements. This is a song about being in conflict balanced with the belief that it only takes a little bit of love and respect to get out of it again. In this, he demonstrates another skill proven throughout – that optimism like this doesn’t have to sound saccharine. 

Listen: A Little Smile 

Strange Land 

“Strange Land” from 2019’s Fool captures the feeling that one’s time has passed without a map by which to proceed into the next era. This song updates a familiar Joe Jackson theme of being on the outside, marked by lyrical jazz textures and a stop-start arrangement that communicates hesitancy. It also reminds listeners that when uncertainty endures, an impulse to ask questions gives us the chance to gain new perspectives as old worlds pass to make way for new ones. 

Listen: Strange Land 

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Runners up and bubbling under: 

• Happy Loving Couples 

• Fools in Love 

• Kinda Kute 

• Got the Time 

• It’s Different for Girls 

• Cancer 

• A Slow Song 

• Happy Ending 

• The Verdict 

• Soul Kiss 

• Nineteen Forever 

• Evil Empire 

• The Jet Set 

• Only the Future 

• Hell of a Town 

• Awkward Age 

• Blue Flame 

• Invisible Man 

• The Blue Time 

• Fabulously Absolute 

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Joe Jackson didn’t exactly fit into any one scene or genre as he developed his career. He still refuses to stay in one artistic province for very long. Yet at the same time, he is an artist with a unique and instantly recognizable artistic voice, with a thread running through everything he’s done that make him one of the most singular artists of the modern rock era.  

Joe Jackson is an active and artistically curious artist today. You can catch up to him at joejackson.com for news and new releases.  

Also, check out this link for a whole TEN MORE great Joe Jackson songs also written by your humble Delete Bin writer and Editor-in-Chief. 

Enjoy! 

#20GreatSongs #JazzRock #JoeJackson #NewWave #singerSongwriters

20 Great Songs by The Police

By the time The Police played Shea Stadium in August 1983 and with a number one album in the charts, they were the biggest band in the world. Somewhat unintuitively for fans soon after this pop pinnacle, they’d go on indefinite hiatus for decades. After a unique journey, it was a dignified way to bow out for three musicians – Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland – who’d come from such disparate backgrounds as to make their union an unlikely one to begin with.  

From their start, they borrowed from everything around them to go along with their punk-inspired energy while not fitting in with any scene or specific sound. Too young to be classic, too old to be punk, they rode the new wave with their heads down, keeping their jazz and prog chops strictly under wraps. What they also did was turn the idea of the pop rock power trio on its head, developing a unique sound never to be replicated by any other band since. And they had great songs to get them there. Here are 20 of them, hits and deep cuts alike, that illustrate their singular identity. 

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Roxanne 

Bassist and singer Sting had been writing songs for several years before co-founding The Police with drummer Stewart Copeland in 1977. Soon after, the technically accomplished Andy Summers joined the band, with his background in progressive rock adding to their sonic arsenal. It was at this point that Sting’s penchant for more sophisticated and musically varied material found fertile soil.  

For instance, “Roxanne” was a bossa nova number before they arranged it into the reggae-rock hybrid heard on 1978’s debut record Outlandos D’Amour. Sting’s clarion call voice is accompanied by the now familiar chopping chords and inverted pulse to accompany a story of obsession and control. After a slow-burn on the charts that took the better part of a year as it was re-released in North America, “Roxanne” was the initial vehicle in which they began their journey from clubs to stadiums and would become a live staple. 

Listen: Roxanne 

Can’t Stand Losing You 

“Can’t Stand Losing You” follows a similar template as “Roxanne”, and then some, threatening to betray their skills as top shelf musicians in the field of raw and elemental punk aggression. The rock-reggae dynamic is in place, but also with a kind of dub-inspired ambient middle section. Luckily, dub was the accepted form of chill out music among punks by 1978. The band would expand upon that middle section on stage where it would later morph into the instrumental track “Regatta De Blanc”.  

These musical additions of more ambient textures would inform their sound later on with their greater use of effects pedals and atmospherics. Lyrically, the song is marked by black humour, containing lines that are more of a parody of a particular kind of pop song than anything to take seriously. “Can’t Stand Losing You” eventually scored a number two position in the UK and played a vital role in convincing the record company to release their full-length debut. 

Listen: Can’t Stand Losing You 

Next to You 

Opening the Outlandos D’Amour record, this cut is a callback to their days masquerading as a punk band, with only former Police guitarist Henry Padovani having any punk cred among the three of them. Of all their fast and short early songs, this one hits the sweet spot best. Like “Roxanne” it’s also a song about obsession, a theme that writer Sting would revisit throughout the band’s discography.  

On this cut, you’d never know that Andy Summers had a well-established Sixties-era R&B, psychedelic, and progressive pedigree as he lays on the appropriate punk-oriented attack to match Sting’s growl of a voice and Copeland’s ferocious drumming. Still not exactly punk rock, it delivered the same spirit. Foo Fighters covered “Next to You” on stage a number of times in the 21st century, at least once with Stewart Copeland sitting in, proving that its immediacy and punk rock attack endures. 

Listen: Next to You 

Hole in My Life 

“Hole in My Life” breaks the pattern of The Police as a punk-inspired band with an affinity for reggae. As it turned out, they were no one-trick pony. Although that reggae influence is in place particularly in Sting’s vocal, James Brown-inspired funk is present here, too. The band build tension on a sweaty groove, accompanied by the YEAH vocal shots to make this one funky track indeed. It certainly demonstrates their cohesion as musicians, revealing the advanced level at which they were operating as instrumentalists. 

 “Hole in My Life” doesn’t necessarily find them capturing the Police sound as it would come to be. But it hints at some of the stylistic influences that would feed its DNA later found in songs like “Too Much Information” and “O My God”. It also shows how versatile they are as musicians, holding an arrangement in balance while adding dynamic flair at the same time. 

Listen: Hole in My Life 

Message in a Bottle 

“Message in a Bottle” is where The Police begin to come into their own sound, and where the signs that they’d thrown out the pop rock power trio rulebook are most evident. Stewart Copeland’s drums are way out front. Andy Summers’ guitar provides vibrancy and colour while remaining a few steps back. Sting’s bass and Copeland’s drums are often foils for each other instead of acting as a unified rhythm section.  

With those dynamics in place, “Message in a Bottle” sounds and feels like a statement of intent outside of any particular genre or scene. The song delves into more sophisticated themes of isolation and vulnerability while still retaining the appealing aggression and instrumental prowess they’d hinted at on their debut. The Police really gel here like never before on their first number one single in the UK and top ten internationally, arguably against the odds considering how many rules they’ve broken.  

Listen: Message in a Bottle 

Walking on the Moon 

Leaning into dub music even further as many post-punk bands were doing by late 1979, “Walking on the Moon” is spare and spacious, led by a low-end riff on which Copeland’s echoey drums and splashes of serrated guitar from Summers are anchored. Serving as their second single from Regatta de Blanc, and their second number one in Britain, “Walking on the Moon” suggests the euphoric feeling of being in love, and of being in the moment, suspended in time.  

This cut isn’t derived from a traditional radio-friendly pop sound at all, and even hints at Sting’s background as a jazz bassist. Yet the subject matter and the hookiness of the bass riff make it utterly compelling as a mesmeric drone that works against traditional pop immediacy. In this, it becomes something more than the sum of its parts as one listens with that low-end throb being so hypnotic as to keep us engaged throughout. 

Listen: Walking on the Moon 

Bring on the Night 

Andy Summers’ flowing guitar lines on this against Sting’s ominous bass sets the scene for this nocturnally-oriented cut with a literary angle. The opening lyrics borrow from T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock” in this song about retreating into the darkness of non-existence. Like “Walking on the Moon”, this cut is designed with holes in its sound that helps create the backdrop for this dark night of the soul tune, in part inspired by Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  

The Police go beyond a three-pronged attack found on their debut and enter into a world of greater sonic nuance. With that, they continue to redefine how a three-piece band operates to deliver more sophisticated material, going beyond the usual rock guitar-bass-drums dynamics to service the overall effect of pure atmosphere in support of a narrative.  Also – this cut was a direct inspiration to the central riff and groove to Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen”. So, there’s that, too. 

Listen: Bring on the Night 

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Deathwish 

Notable for it being one of only a few co-writes between all three members, along with the absence of a chorus, “Deathwish” is like a post-punk teenage tragedy song just before the tragedy in question happens. A companion piece to “Bring on the Night” in a way, this song deals in dark roads, fading headlight beams, and a hint of youthful nihilism that served as the last vestiges of the punk rock mentality in their music.  

The Police lock into a mechanical groove that is all about building tension. As well-known as they are as purveyors of hit singles, “Deathwish” is an excellent example of The Police as a jam band, creating a sound that is primarily about a vamping groove defined by a masterclass command of tension and release held in balance – something they’re great at which their singles don’t reveal in quite this same way. 

Listen: Deathwish 

Driven to Tears 

When 1980’s Zenyatta Mondatta came out, The Police had ramped up as a global phenomenon. The pressure was on as their first world tour kicked off in the early part of the year. Even as rushed as they were to follow up with a third record in the middle of tour dates, they were still able to create some of their most memorable songs. This was one of them, a lament to Third World poverty and with its ire aimed at voyeuristic media; too many cameras, not enough food.  

Rooted in an amalgam of reggae, dub, and rock music, “Driven to Tears” doubles down on the echoey and phased sound they’d established on their previous record, the highlights being Andy Summers’ minimalist shards of guitar and wail of a solo, sympatico with Sting’s resigned vocal, and Copeland’s percussive accents. This cut would be a precursor to the political material Sting would pursue in his solo career, with this tune remaining to be a mainstay in his setlists. 

Listen: Driven to Tears 

Don’t Stand So Close to Me 

Inspired by Victor Nabokov’s Lolita, Sting’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is one of The Police’s most recognizable and celebrated hits. By this time, Andy Summers’ command of effect pedals begins to take a bigger role in their sound, expanding what he’s able to do with his parts to create engaging sonic environments in which to present the songs. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is one of the best examples of that signature set of textures.  

The low and ominous wash of sound from him sets the stage for the drama of misguided attraction, loss of innocence, and failed ethics. For a top ten hit, this is some dark subject matter. Adorned with an energetic and catchy chorus that contrasts the more sombre verses, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is a high point that demonstrates the pinnacle of their interplay as a band in the studio. 

Listen: Don’t Stand So Close to Me 

When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around 

Contemplating the end of the world was a common pursuit by the dawn of the 1980s. This one is a post-apocalyptic story about being the last person on earth, with boredom and loneliness as more formidable enemies than zombies or giant insects. But what this song also does is to explore a common theme that Sting has expanded upon on other songs – the nature of isolation and its debilitating effects on the human spirit in the modern day.  

The R&B influences heard on “Hole in My Life” come through here again in Sting’s phrasing, even if it’s within the context of a more consolidated Police sound full of spacious echo and phasing. His distant vocal sounds like its being broadcast over short-wave radio brings the point about loneliness and a lack of connection into sharp relief. 

Listen: When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What Still Around 

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

For such a literary-minded songwriter, Sting takes his own medium to task on this song that was a massive worldwide hit for The Police. “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” expounds on the language of the heart being more meaningful than political rhetoric used to obscure truths. In addition to the pointed lyrical subject matter, The Police’s skills as instrumentalists were well on display with sophisticated chords, unique textures, and rhythmic complexity a-plenty that really stood out on the radio at the time. 

The middle instrumental section alone feels like they could have taken the song in any direction between the three of them. Their advanced instrumental proficiency was rightly celebrated at this point rather than denigrated as it might have been only a few years before when they were playing at CBGB for a punk audience. Times had changed and eventually so would The Police, particularly as the expectations for hit after hit plus the rigours of global tours increased.  

Listen: De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

Invisible Sun 

The pressures on the band would continue by the time they recorded 1981’s Ghost in the Machine. In the meantime, Sting had his eye on the headlines. “Invisible Sun” was his take on sectarian violence and military intervention in Northern Ireland at the time, those conditions making it difficult for people living there to see what the future would hold for them and for generations to come.  

The Police sound morphed here thanks to a greater use of synthesizers and with a less pop-oriented, more post-punk feel. Sting uses a lower register to deliver his vocal in the verses, then double-tracked in the chorus to communicate a cry for hope in the bleakness of the times. “Invisible Sun” is tellingly far less oriented around the ensemble playing of the three members. That’s played out in various degrees on the whole record, made during a tense time when the ties were fraying between bandmates. 

Listen: Invisible Sun 

Spirits in the Material World 

A big part of the change to The Police sound by Ghost in the Machine was a switch in the production team, with Nigel Gray replaced with Hugh Padgham. Another was Sting’s tendency to record solo demos rather than working out arrangements on the floor with the band. On this cut, that resulted in more synthesized sounds closer to his initial demos to accompany his amazingly bonkers dub-inspired bassline and almost frenzied double-tracked upper register vocals.  

Reduced in his role in the arrangement on this cut, Andy Summers still makes his mark via his almost classical flourishes in the instrumental break and into the last verse. Stewart Copeland holds down a pulse anchored to his hi-hat as the song’s complex rhythm shifts in unexpected ways from off-beats in the verses to on-beats in the chorus to accompany the themes of failure and disconnection in human systems and the spiritual malaise that results.  

Listen: Spirits in the Material World 

Every Little Thing She Does is Magic 

Sting wrote this song several years before The Police even formed, and certainly not with their sound in mind. For inclusion on Ghost in the Machine, he worked with keyboardist Jean Roussel who laid down the central piano riff around which this hit song was based. Summers and Copeland were not in favour of this outside element when it came to their material. Yet, the finished product was undeniable, even to them.  

“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” shines very brightly – a shimmering love song that sounded great on the radio at the time, and adds important colour to the album. Copeland’s drumming in particular is exceptional, adding the edge the song needs to keep it from being too soft, and still within the realm of The Police sound as listeners had come to know it.   

Listen: Every Little Thing She Does is Magic 

Secret Journey 

In the middle of a whirlwind of becoming the biggest band in the world while the connections between bandmates were strained to their limits, Sting turned inward. “Secret Journey” is concerned with spiritual exploration, possibly to counteract the very worldly expectations set upon his shoulders and those of his band. 

Andy Summers distinguishes himself on this cut, his Roland guitar synthesizer creating the expansive introduction and atmospheric touches throughout. This tune tonally anchors the whole record which is decidedly less brightly lit and certainly more world-weary than Zenyatta Mondatta. This was during a time on which Stewart Copeland reflected in his excellent 2006 documentary Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out that “it was getting lonely in this band”.   

Listen: Secret Journey 

Every Breath You Take 

After a period apart and in pursuit of solo projects – acting, film composing, and an ambient guitar album – The Police came back strong with a new album which is arguably their best. Synchronicity stormed up the charts in 1983, with this song leading the pack. A seemingly straightforward love song on the surface, it reveals the dark theme of possession found on “Roxanne” on closer inspection, paired with yet another disturbing element – surveillance.  

Andy Summers’ arpeggiated guitar lines that cut between major and minor chords set the mood and are iconic by now, while Stewart Copeland’s drums are uncharacteristically restrained – a big part of what makes this song so tense. As much as this song is well-travelled by now, it’s easy to forget that it contains some of Sting’s best singing, making great use of his full range. 

Listen: Every Breath You Take 

Synchronicity II 

Inspired by Arthur Koestler’s Roots of Coincidence, Sting’s story about a put-upon middle-class family man told in contrast to images of a rising horror beneath the surface of a dark Scottish loch is a terrifying statement about the human psyche and its limits. This song is Sting at his most cinematic as the pressures build inside the central character and as the beast far away rises further to the surface as both a metaphor and a parallel for the man’s repressed rage. 

Musically, “Synchronicity II” is the full realization of The Police sound on an epic scale. Copeland’s drums are fully unleashed, sounding like waves crashing against a shore. Summers’ roaring riff answers Sting’s authoritative vocal, also adding in atonal squeals and bestial wails to fill in the gaps.  This is a towering rock song full of portent, which in the Cold War era certainly reflected the atmosphere of its times. 

Listen: Synchronicity II 

Wrapped Around Your Finger 

The imbalanced power dynamics only hinted at in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” come to their maturity here in this tune about mentorship, ambition, and betrayal. With lines that reflect a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice tale, “Wrapped Around Your Finger” captures the imagination with a sense of foreboding, feeling like a whole movie inside its five-minute running time.  

This song is arguably the most detailed of all The Police’s hit singles when it comes to the arrangement. Stewart Copeland provides a whole orchestra of percussion behind the spare synth lines and Andy Summers’ portentous wash of treated guitar and echoey phrasing. Sting shows his maturity as a songwriter here in a cinematic tune about how quickly the tables can turn in a relationship, with parties often taking what they can from each other before moving on.  

Listen: Wrapped Around Your Finger 

Tea in the Sahara 

The final track on the UK version of Synchronicity, the lyrics in “Tea in the Sahara” take on the quality of a myth, inspired by Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky that contains this tale of an unfulfilled promise. It’s appropriately accompanied by Andy Summers’ guitar effects that evoke the unspoiled dunes of a moonlit African desert with Copeland’s interplay between hi-hat and kick drum accents supporting Sting’s heartbeat-like bassline.  

Of all the songs on Synchronicity, this one reflects what the band’s sound might have been had they gathered in the studio to record a sixth record – warm, timeless, stylistically ambiguous, and wonderfully multilayered. In this expectation by 1984, we listeners were the sisters waiting in the desert for the promised prince who would never return – at least not with a follow-up album.  

Listen: Tea in the Sahara 

*** 

Runners up and bubbling under: 

• Fall Out 
• Truth Hits Everybody 
• So Lonely 
• Born in the 50s 
• Bed’s Too Big Without You 
• A Sermon 
• No Time This Time 
• Voices Inside My Head 
• Canary in a Coalmine 
• Man in a Suitcase 
• Omegaman 
• Demolition Man 
• One World (Not Three) 
• Darkness 
• Shambelle 
• I Burn for You 
• Murder by Numbers 
• King of Pain 
• O My God 
• Walking in Your Footsteps 

*** 

When the Police gathered for their reunion tour in 2007, they knew that the material they’d created no longer belonged to them, and that there was nothing more for them to add other than by playing it together again. That realization took the pressure off them, allowing them to frame the material as the star of the show, with the three musicians who created it as merely the conduits. Given the strong personalities involved, that certainly shows the depth of value of their songs – many of them driven by conflict and dark impulses that resonated with a whole generation.  

For the three musicians, the reunion seemed to do them as much good as it did for fans to hear them play these songs again. After decades of solo projects, they could view The Police in retrospect at a safe distance. It certainly underscored the point that their material stands on its own in any era whether the three play together again or not. That’s a significant achievement that goes beyond any other ambition, Shea Stadium included. 

To learn more about The Police, investigate thepolice.com 

You might also want to check out YouTube host, producer, and musician Rick Beato’s series of interviews with all three members of The Police in which each of them talk about the band and their own musical approaches while in it:

Stewart Copeland | Sting | Andy Summers

Check out Stewart Copeland’s YouTube channel on which, among other things, he hosts impromptu jams with a lot of musicians you’ve heard of. And for an added delightful bonus, here’s some footage of Stewart Copeland playing percussion on “Wrapped Around Your Finger” during the band’s 2007-08 reunion tour. It is something!

Andy Summers is active on Instagram. Check out his feed at @andysummers_official

And of course, Sting hasn’t exactly slacked off as a solo artist. His site is (perhaps predictably) sting.com.

EEE-OH-oh!

Enjoy!

#20GreatSongs #70sMusic #80sMusic #AndySummers #StewartCopeland #Sting #ThePolice

20 Great Songs by The Police

By the time The Police played Shea Stadium in August 1983 and with a number one album in the charts, they were the biggest band in the world. Somewhat unintuitively for fans soon after this pop pinnacle, they’d go on indefinite hiatus for decades. After a unique journey, it was a dignified way to bow out for three musicians – Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland – who’d come from such disparate backgrounds as to make their union an unlikely one to begin with.  

From their start, they borrowed from everything around them to go along with their punk-inspired energy while not fitting in with any scene or specific sound. Too young to be classic, too old to be punk, they rode the new wave with their heads down, keeping their jazz and prog chops strictly under wraps. What they also did was turn the idea of the pop rock power trio on its head, developing a unique sound never to be replicated by any other band since. And they had great songs to get them there. Here are 20 of them, hits and deep cuts alike, that illustrate their singular identity. 

*** 

Roxanne 

Bassist and singer Sting had been writing songs for several years before co-founding The Police with drummer Stewart Copeland in 1977. Soon after, the technically accomplished Andy Summers joined the band, with his background in progressive rock adding to their sonic arsenal. It was at this point that Sting’s penchant for more sophisticated and musically varied material found fertile soil.  

For instance, “Roxanne” was a bossa nova number before they arranged it into the reggae-rock hybrid heard on 1978’s debut record Outlandos D’Amour. Sting’s clarion call voice is accompanied by the now familiar chopping chords and inverted pulse to accompany a story of obsession and control. After a slow-burn on the charts that took the better part of a year as it was re-released in North America, “Roxanne” was the initial vehicle in which they began their journey from clubs to stadiums and would become a live staple. 

Listen: Roxanne 

Can’t Stand Losing You 

“Can’t Stand Losing You” follows a similar template as “Roxanne”, and then some, threatening to betray their skills as top shelf musicians in the field of raw and elemental punk aggression. The rock-reggae dynamic is in place, but also with a kind of dub-inspired ambient middle section. Luckily, dub was the accepted form of chill out music among punks by 1978. The band would expand upon that middle section on stage where it would later morph into the instrumental track “Regatta De Blanc”.  

These musical additions of more ambient textures would inform their sound later on with their greater use of effects pedals and atmospherics. Lyrically, the song is marked by black humour, containing lines that are more of a parody of a particular kind of pop song than anything to take seriously. “Can’t Stand Losing You” eventually scored a number two position in the UK and played a vital role in convincing the record company to release their full-length debut. 

Listen: Can’t Stand Losing You 

Next to You 

Opening the Outlandos D’Amour record, this cut is a callback to their days masquerading as a punk band, with only former Police guitarist Henry Padovani having any punk cred among the three of them. Of all their fast and short early songs, this one hits the sweet spot best. Like “Roxanne” it’s also a song about obsession, a theme that writer Sting would revisit throughout the band’s discography.  

On this cut, you’d never know that Andy Summers had a well-established Sixties-era R&B, psychedelic, and progressive pedigree as he lays on the appropriate punk-oriented attack to match Sting’s growl of a voice and Copeland’s ferocious drumming. Still not exactly punk rock, it delivered the same spirit. Foo Fighters covered “Next to You” on stage a number of times in the 21st century, at least once with Stewart Copeland sitting in, proving that its immediacy and punk rock attack endures. 

Listen: Next to You 

Hole in My Life 

“Hole in My Life” breaks the pattern of The Police as a punk-inspired band with an affinity for reggae. As it turned out, they were no one-trick pony. Although that reggae influence is in place particularly in Sting’s vocal, James Brown-inspired funk is present here, too. The band build tension on a sweaty groove, accompanied by the YEAH vocal shots to make this one funky track indeed. It certainly demonstrates their cohesion as musicians, revealing the advanced level at which they were operating as instrumentalists. 

 “Hole in My Life” doesn’t necessarily find them capturing the Police sound as it would come to be. But it hints at some of the stylistic influences that would feed its DNA later found in songs like “Too Much Information” and “O My God”. It also shows how versatile they are as musicians, holding an arrangement in balance while adding dynamic flair at the same time. 

Listen: Hole in My Life 

Message in a Bottle 

“Message in a Bottle” is where The Police begin to come into their own sound, and where the signs that they’d thrown out the pop rock power trio rulebook are most evident. Stewart Copeland’s drums are way out front. Andy Summers’ guitar provides vibrancy and colour while remaining a few steps back. Sting’s bass and Copeland’s drums are often foils for each other instead of acting as a unified rhythm section.  

With those dynamics in place, “Message in a Bottle” sounds and feels like a statement of intent outside of any particular genre or scene. The song delves into more sophisticated themes of isolation and vulnerability while still retaining the appealing aggression and instrumental prowess they’d hinted at on their debut. The Police really gel here like never before on their first number one single in the UK and top ten internationally, arguably against the odds considering how many rules they’ve broken.  

Listen: Message in a Bottle 

Walking on the Moon 

Leaning into dub music even further as many post-punk bands were doing by late 1979, “Walking on the Moon” is spare and spacious, led by a low-end riff on which Copeland’s echoey drums and splashes of serrated guitar from Summers are anchored. Serving as their second single from Regatta de Blanc, and their second number one in Britain, “Walking on the Moon” suggests the euphoric feeling of being in love, and of being in the moment, suspended in time.  

This cut isn’t derived from a traditional radio-friendly pop sound at all, and even hints at Sting’s background as a jazz bassist. Yet the subject matter and the hookiness of the bass riff make it utterly compelling as a mesmeric drone that works against traditional pop immediacy. In this, it becomes something more than the sum of its parts as one listens with that low-end throb being so hypnotic as to keep us engaged throughout. 

Listen: Walking on the Moon 

Bring on the Night 

Andy Summers’ flowing guitar lines on this against Sting’s ominous bass sets the scene for this nocturnally-oriented cut with a literary angle. The opening lyrics borrow from T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock” in this song about retreating into the darkness of non-existence. Like “Walking on the Moon”, this cut is designed with holes in its sound that helps create the backdrop for this dark night of the soul tune, in part inspired by Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  

The Police go beyond a three-pronged attack found on their debut and enter into a world of greater sonic nuance. With that, they continue to redefine how a three-piece band operates to deliver more sophisticated material, going beyond the usual rock guitar-bass-drums dynamics to service the overall effect of pure atmosphere in support of a narrative.  Also – this cut was a direct inspiration to the central riff and groove to Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen”. So, there’s that, too. 

Listen: Bring on the Night 

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Deathwish 

Notable for it being one of only a few co-writes between all three members, along with the absence of a chorus, “Deathwish” is like a post-punk teenage tragedy song just before the tragedy in question happens. A companion piece to “Bring on the Night” in a way, this song deals in dark roads, fading headlight beams, and a hint of youthful nihilism that served as the last vestiges of the punk rock mentality in their music.  

The Police lock into a mechanical groove that is all about building tension. As well-known as they are as purveyors of hit singles, “Deathwish” is an excellent example of The Police as a jam band, creating a sound that is primarily about a vamping groove defined by a masterclass command of tension and release held in balance – something they’re great at which their singles don’t reveal in quite this same way. 

Listen: Deathwish 

Driven to Tears 

When 1980’s Zenyatta Mondatta came out, The Police had ramped up as a global phenomenon. The pressure was on as their first world tour kicked off in the early part of the year. Even as rushed as they were to follow up with a third record in the middle of tour dates, they were still able to create some of their most memorable songs. This was one of them, a lament to Third World poverty and with its ire aimed at voyeuristic media; too many cameras, not enough food.  

Rooted in an amalgam of reggae, dub, and rock music, “Driven to Tears” doubles down on the echoey and phased sound they’d established on their previous record, the highlights being Andy Summers’ minimalist shards of guitar and wail of a solo, sympatico with Sting’s resigned vocal, and Copeland’s percussive accents. This cut would be a precursor to the political material Sting would pursue in his solo career, with this tune remaining to be a mainstay in his setlists. 

Listen: Driven to Tears 

Don’t Stand So Close to Me 

Inspired by Victor Nabokov’s Lolita, Sting’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is one of The Police’s most recognizable and celebrated hits. By this time, Andy Summers’ command of effect pedals begins to take a bigger role in their sound, expanding what he’s able to do with his parts to create engaging sonic environments in which to present the songs. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is one of the best examples of that signature set of textures.  

The low and ominous wash of sound from him sets the stage for the drama of misguided attraction, loss of innocence, and failed ethics. For a top ten hit, this is some dark subject matter. Adorned with an energetic and catchy chorus that contrasts the more sombre verses, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is a high point that demonstrates the pinnacle of their interplay as a band in the studio. 

Listen: Don’t Stand So Close to Me 

When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around 

Contemplating the end of the world was a common pursuit by the dawn of the 1980s. This one is a post-apocalyptic story about being the last person on earth, with boredom and loneliness as more formidable enemies than zombies or giant insects. But what this song also does is to explore a common theme that Sting has expanded upon on other songs – the nature of isolation and its debilitating effects on the human spirit in the modern day.  

The R&B influences heard on “Hole in My Life” come through here again in Sting’s phrasing, even if it’s within the context of a more consolidated Police sound full of spacious echo and phasing. His distant vocal sounds like its being broadcast over short-wave radio brings the point about loneliness and a lack of connection into sharp relief. 

Listen: When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What Still Around 

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

For such a literary-minded songwriter, Sting takes his own medium to task on this song that was a massive worldwide hit for The Police. “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” expounds on the language of the heart being more meaningful than political rhetoric used to obscure truths. In addition to the pointed lyrical subject matter, The Police’s skills as instrumentalists were well on display with sophisticated chords, unique textures, and rhythmic complexity a-plenty that really stood out on the radio at the time. 

The middle instrumental section alone feels like they could have taken the song in any direction between the three of them. Their advanced instrumental proficiency was rightly celebrated at this point rather than denigrated as it might have been only a few years before when they were playing at CBGB for a punk audience. Times had changed and eventually so would The Police, particularly as the expectations for hit after hit plus the rigours of global tours increased.  

Listen: De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

Invisible Sun 

The pressures on the band would continue by the time they recorded 1981’s Ghost in the Machine. In the meantime, Sting had his eye on the headlines. “Invisible Sun” was his take on sectarian violence and military intervention in Northern Ireland at the time, those conditions making it difficult for people living there to see what the future would hold for them and for generations to come.  

The Police sound morphed here thanks to a greater use of synthesizers and with a less pop-oriented, more post-punk feel. Sting uses a lower register to deliver his vocal in the verses, then double-tracked in the chorus to communicate a cry for hope in the bleakness of the times. “Invisible Sun” is tellingly far less oriented around the ensemble playing of the three members. That’s played out in various degrees on the whole record, made during a tense time when the ties were fraying between bandmates. 

Listen: Invisible Sun 

Spirits in the Material World 

A big part of the change to The Police sound by Ghost in the Machine was a switch in the production team, with Nigel Gray replaced with Hugh Padgham. Another was Sting’s tendency to record solo demos rather than working out arrangements on the floor with the band. On this cut, that resulted in more synthesized sounds closer to his initial demos to accompany his amazingly bonkers dub-inspired bassline and almost frenzied double-tracked upper register vocals.  

Reduced in his role in the arrangement on this cut, Andy Summers still makes his mark via his almost classical flourishes in the instrumental break and into the last verse. Stewart Copeland holds down a pulse anchored to his hi-hat as the song’s complex rhythm shifts in unexpected ways from off-beats in the verses to on-beats in the chorus to accompany the themes of failure and disconnection in human systems and the spiritual malaise that results.  

Listen: Spirits in the Material World 

Every Little Thing She Does is Magic 

Sting wrote this song several years before The Police even formed, and certainly not with their sound in mind. For inclusion on Ghost in the Machine, he worked with keyboardist Jean Roussel who laid down the central piano riff around which this hit song was based. Summers and Copeland were not in favour of this outside element when it came to their material. Yet, the finished product was undeniable, even to them.  

“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” shines very brightly – a shimmering love song that sounded great on the radio at the time, and adds important colour to the album. Copeland’s drumming in particular is exceptional, adding the edge the song needs to keep it from being too soft, and still within the realm of The Police sound as listeners had come to know it.   

Listen: Every Little Thing She Does is Magic 

Secret Journey 

In the middle of a whirlwind of becoming the biggest band in the world while the connections between bandmates were strained to their limits, Sting turned inward. “Secret Journey” is concerned with spiritual exploration, possibly to counteract the very worldly expectations set upon his shoulders and those of his band. 

Andy Summers distinguishes himself on this cut, his Roland guitar synthesizer creating the expansive introduction and atmospheric touches throughout. This tune tonally anchors the whole record which is decidedly less brightly lit and certainly more world-weary than Zenyatta Mondatta. This was during a time on which Stewart Copeland reflected in his excellent 2006 documentary Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out that “it was getting lonely in this band”.   

Listen: Secret Journey 

Every Breath You Take 

After a period apart and in pursuit of solo projects – acting, film composing, and an ambient guitar album – The Police came back strong with a new album which is arguably their best. Synchronicity stormed up the charts in 1983, with this song leading the pack. A seemingly straightforward love song on the surface, it reveals the dark theme of possession found on “Roxanne” on closer inspection, paired with yet another disturbing element – surveillance.  

Andy Summers’ arpeggiated guitar lines that cut between major and minor chords set the mood and are iconic by now, while Stewart Copeland’s drums are uncharacteristically restrained – a big part of what makes this song so tense. As much as this song is well-travelled by now, it’s easy to forget that it contains some of Sting’s best singing, making great use of his full range. 

Listen: Every Breath You Take 

Synchronicity II 

Inspired by Arthur Koestler’s Roots of Coincidence, Sting’s story about a put-upon middle-class family man told in contrast to images of a rising horror beneath the surface of a dark Scottish loch is a terrifying statement about the human psyche and its limits. This song is Sting at his most cinematic as the pressures build inside the central character and as the beast far away rises further to the surface as both a metaphor and a parallel for the man’s repressed rage. 

Musically, “Synchronicity II” is the full realization of The Police sound on an epic scale. Copeland’s drums are fully unleashed, sounding like waves crashing against a shore. Summers’ roaring riff answers Sting’s authoritative vocal, also adding in atonal squeals and bestial wails to fill in the gaps.  This is a towering rock song full of portent, which in the Cold War era certainly reflected the atmosphere of its times. 

Listen: Synchronicity II 

Wrapped Around Your Finger 

The imbalanced power dynamics only hinted at in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” come to their maturity here in this tune about mentorship, ambition, and betrayal. With lines that reflect a kind of sorcerer’s apprentice tale, “Wrapped Around Your Finger” captures the imagination with a sense of foreboding, feeling like a whole movie inside its five-minute running time.  

This song is arguably the most detailed of all The Police’s hit singles when it comes to the arrangement. Stewart Copeland provides a whole orchestra of percussion behind the spare synth lines and Andy Summers’ portentous wash of treated guitar and echoey phrasing. Sting shows his maturity as a songwriter here in a cinematic tune about how quickly the tables can turn in a relationship, with parties often taking what they can from each other before moving on.  

Listen: Wrapped Around Your Finger 

Tea in the Sahara 

The final track on the UK version of Synchronicity, the lyrics in “Tea in the Sahara” take on the quality of a myth, inspired by Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky that contains this tale of an unfulfilled promise. It’s appropriately accompanied by Andy Summers’ guitar effects that evoke the unspoiled dunes of a moonlit African desert with Copeland’s interplay between hi-hat and kick drum accents supporting Sting’s heartbeat-like bassline.  

Of all the songs on Synchronicity, this one reflects what the band’s sound might have been had they gathered in the studio to record a sixth record – warm, timeless, stylistically ambiguous, and wonderfully multilayered. In this expectation by 1984, we listeners were the sisters waiting in the desert for the promised prince who would never return – at least not with a follow-up album.  

Listen: Tea in the Sahara 

*** 

Runners up and bubbling under: 

• Fall Out 
• Truth Hits Everybody 
• So Lonely 
• Born in the 50s 
• Bed’s Too Big Without You 
• A Sermon 
• No Time This Time 
• Voices Inside My Head 
• Canary in a Coalmine 
• Man in a Suitcase 
• Omegaman 
• Demolition Man 
• One World (Not Three) 
• Darkness 
• Shambelle 
• I Burn for You 
• Murder by Numbers 
• King of Pain 
• O My God 
• Walking in Your Footsteps 

*** 

When the Police gathered for their reunion tour in 2007, they knew that the material they’d created no longer belonged to them, and that there was nothing more for them to add other than by playing it together again. That realization took the pressure off them, allowing them to frame the material as the star of the show, with the three musicians who created it as merely the conduits. Given the strong personalities involved, that certainly shows the depth of value of their songs – many of them driven by conflict and dark impulses that resonated with a whole generation.  

For the three musicians, the reunion seemed to do them as much good as it did for fans to hear them play these songs again. After decades of solo projects, they could view The Police in retrospect at a safe distance. It certainly underscored the point that their material stands on its own in any era whether the three play together again or not. That’s a significant achievement that goes beyond any other ambition, Shea Stadium included. 

To learn more about The Police, investigate thepolice.com 

You might also want to check out YouTube host, producer, and musician Rick Beato’s series of interviews with all three members of The Police in which each of them talk about the band and their own musical approaches while in it:

Stewart Copeland | Sting | Andy Summers

Check out Stewart Copeland’s YouTube channel on which, among other things, he hosts impromptu jams with a lot of musicians you’ve heard of. And for an added delightful bonus, here’s some footage of Stewart Copeland playing percussion on “Wrapped Around Your Finger” during the band’s 2007-08 reunion tour. It is something!

Andy Summers is active on Instagram. Check out his feed at @andysummers_official

And of course, Sting hasn’t exactly slacked off as a solo artist. His site is (perhaps predictably) sting.com.

EEE-OH-oh!

Enjoy!

#20GreatSongs #70sMusic #80sMusic #AndySummers #StewartCopeland #Sting #ThePolice

Starting as a pair of jazz snobs at Bard College in New York State, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen began an initial career as songwriters for other artists while keeping the material too idiosyncratic for anyone else for themselves. They formed Steely Dan by 1971 as a vehicle for that music that represented an amalgam of their influences; blues-rock, Sixties post-bop jazz, Latin music, and even some radio-friendly pop. But the standard band format couldn’t contain them for long. 

At a certain point, touring took too much time away from what they wanted to do; focus on intricate arrangements and meticulously-rendered production. In all of its incarnations around the two principles, Steely Dan now represents a unique body of work that endures today, remaining to be the subject of polarized discussions between music fans who cite their sound in terms of both lauded praise and disdainful derision. Here are 20 examples of their finest work in all of its sardonic and jaded glory. 

Fire in the Hole 

In retrospect, one can hear Steely Dan finding themselves on 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, sounding like nothing else at the time while producing a brace of hits in “Do it Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years”. Best capturing where they were at the time, “Fire in the Hole” is the sound of a band with an unconventional but firm direction in mind in a song about being young while feeling old, out of sorts, and out of place and time. 

Donald Fagen’s barrel-rolling piano intro demands immediate attention, then accompanied by his distinctive sandpapery sneer of a lead voice. Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s pedal steel accents and solo give this tune yet another layer of the unconventional while Fagen’s Blue Note jazz piano solo conveys sophistication matched with a brand of hip melancholy, those two ingredients being surprisingly compatible here. 

Listen: Fire in the Hole 

Only a Fool Would Say That 

Steely Dan integrated Latin textures to jazz and rock music to seamless effect, not to mention injecting brightness and shadow in the same song. “Only a Fool Would Say That” is the best example, locking into a tasty groove as if beamed directly from the sun-washed streets of Spanish Harlem. The breezy arrangement is full of popping congas, Denny Dias’ and “Skunk” Baxter’s effervescent guitars, and Walter Becker’s subtle bass signature.  

The song examines American countercultural idealism through a jaded lens. Its sublime textures belie the theme of optimism that comes to nothing, particularly applicable during the post-1960s hangover. The reality of the boy with the plan, the natural man of the beatific hippy dream, abrades against the image of the man in his brown shoes with his nine-to-five, showing that things hadn’t changed much for the person in the street as Nixon’s second term loomed. 

Listen: Only a Fool Would Say That 

Dirty Work 

A vivid story-song, and with lead vocals from David Palmer, “Dirty Work” concerns a man entangled by a disaffected married woman, called upon to see to her while her man is out of town. Both narrator and his married lover lack the courage to face what they both know will inevitably come to no good as one clings to his infatuation while the other clings to a lifestyle she doesn’t want to sacrifice.  

Accompanied by soulful organ, mellow electric piano, and a breathy horn arrangement, “Dirty Work” is a cinematically-scaled melodrama. Palmer’s pure tenor voice suggests a wide-eyed loss of innocence in the exploitative world of the wealthy, giving this song a touch of class – consciousness, that is. Palmer’s delivery makes him the obvious choice over Fagen’s musical persona who has no innocence to lose in a story like this one. 

Listen: Dirty Work 

Bodhisattva 

A highlight of 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy, this cut’s sparse lyrics are packed with meaning in conveying the careless whims of the rich similarly outlined in “Dirty Work”. Here, Eastern centeredness meets Western materialism as an entire spiritual tradition is reduced to an affectation by a narrator uniquely positioned, economically speaking, to cast off shallow materialism for higher spiritual ideals. 

The band lay down a tight and tumbling groove inside a three-line blues structure, and then careen down a corridor of jazz chords bolstered by exploratory piano and deft guitar lines. By this time, Steely Dan were still a conventional band with this song being a stalwart part of their live set. The 1974 live version recorded during a show in Santa Monica is notable for its frenzied pace, Michael McDonald’s backing vocals, and the inebriated and rambling introduction by Jerome Aniton. 

Listen: Bodhisattva | Bodhisattva (live) 

My Old School 

Making sure that the world knew their position on nostalgia, “My Old School” is Becker and Fagen’s jaundiced and autobiographical view based on true events. It tells a tale of a drug bust at a suburban college and the resulting disappointments as one finds out who one’s real friends are during heady school days. As usual, the lyrics tell one story while the music tells another to compelling effect.  

“My Old School” is Steely Dan at their most musically effusive, with celebratory soul revue-style horns as they meet with stinging rock guitar.  Obliquely, “My Old School” is about the kind of heartbreak felt when people we thought we knew take up unexpected and unreconcilable positions against us. A story of betrayal never sounded so full of the lifeforce in one of the many Dan tunes that cast aspersions on provincial attitudes. 

Listen: My Old School 

King of the World 

Steely Dan explores the end of civilization on “King of the World”, positing that the biggest hurdle beyond the basics for the last person on earth are disconnection and loneliness. With an intro that makes three notes seem portentous, “King of the World” is the sound of a man pleading for company he knows is unlikely to arrive, with any inherited kingdom in his possession being an empty prize. 

Starting with Jim Hodder’s Isaac Hayes-like high-hats, later joined by Becker’s humming bassline, this cut is built on an epic scale with layered, texturally varied guitars. The airy synth solo provides a futurist vibe, the ghostly voices in the middle-eight section sounding like remnants of a world long gone. Like so many science fiction tales, this is a warning about present-day human struggles, both spiritual and political, beamed out like a one-sided message on an old Ham radio. 

Listen: King of the World 

Night by Night 

The second track on 1974’s Pretzel Logic is a triumph of punchy horns and slinky, winding rhythms. This is the story of a down-and-out denizen of the urban underbelly hoping in vain for a way out of a world of jealousy and mayhem that’s lit up in Vegas neon. It’s a soundtrack to decadent and dangerous after-hours streets when shadowy figures come out to play.  

The guitar breaks are fiery and precise, shadowed by dexterous bass guitar, and with the intricately arranged brass playing in and out of the mix. The croaking wah-wah clavinet is the engine to what sounds like the theme song to the best TV show never made. This tune captures Steely Dan at a point when the touring was about to end as they began to shed core members in favour of studio sessioners to evolve their sound. 

Listen: Night by Night 

Any Major Dude Will Tell You 

Serving as the B-side to their “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” hit single, “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” is notable on its own for a few reasons. One of those is how lyrically upfront it is – a rarity in Steely Dan’s catalogue – even if Fagen is still singing a character. This tune finds a hipster noting the despondency in one of his compadres, then reaching out with a brand of encouragement that’s wearing shades, however genuine the advice. 

The smooth sound by which they would be most identified starts here, supplemented by Chuck Rainey’s bass while official band member Denny Dias takes the guitar solo. By this time, the one-time New York-based songwriting duo who lampooned the absurdity of West Coast lifestyles had made inroads to building on what would become known as The California Sound. Irony abounds in Dan land!  

Listen: Any Major Dude Will Tell You 

Doctor Wu 

The Katy Lied album in 1975 represented a full studio-bound focus, working with musicians who possessed the chops to contribute to whatever Becker and Fagen had in mind for each track. A highlight on that record is “Doctor Wu”, which turns down the dial on harder-edged rock in favour of a smoother, jazz-oriented arrangement. This brings a contrasting gentleness to grim themes in this character-driven song purportedly based on true events.  

On a song about addiction and the hope of recovery, Fagen’s voice is as earnest as it’s possible for it to be, lit up by a pristine backdrop of bright piano, Jeff Porcaro’s melodically-supportive drums, and even a touch of wind chimes. The alto saxophone solo from sessioner Phil Woods is vibrant and optimistic with only a touch of desperation in a harrowing story about struggle, uncertainty, dependence, and disappointment.  

Listen: Doctor Wu 

Chain Lightning 

“Chain Lightning” demonstrates Steely Dan’s love of a basic groove in an established form. This is supplemented by guitarist Rick Derringer who lays down an electrifying solo true to the song’s title. But because this is Steely Dan, this song carries the whiff of intrigue dressed up as a free and easy blues excursion in this story about infiltration and intrusion for the sheer thrill of it. 

The lyrics suggest a furtive conversation between members of the criminal, cult, or celebrity-seeking variety. Any distinctions between those are notably unimportant as they devise a plan to go beyond the barricades unnoticed and into privileged territory. Feeling so good rooted in a light and breezy blues shuffle, it’s easy to miss that there is a source of menace in this tune somewhere that seems to hint at darker intentions and nefarious motives. 

Listen: Chain Lightning 

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Any World (That I’m Welcome To) 

Since “Fire in the Hole”, Steely Dan sang of outsiders, misfits, and freaks as their lyrical homebase. This is the story of someone who is not an outsider but who perhaps wishes to be, wanting to get out of their life in favour of a world just out of their imagination’s reach. In this, “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is less about the freedom of an imagined new life and more about being trapped in an old one that’s all too real. 

Michael McDonald distinguishes himself as a backing vocalist on this, his first appearance on a Steely Dan record. The song’s shifting rhythm between 4/4 and 2/4 lends it a sense of restlessness true to its themes. It’s chord structure and melodic sense plays between rock and jazz while upcoming musicians like Joe Jackson listened with keen ears. 

Listen: Any World (That I’m Welcome To) 

The Royal Scam 

Where they’re famous for their character-driven stories of the seedy and corrupt underbelly of American life, the title track to their 1976 record edges on involved and even outraged social commentary. The song paints a portrait of Puerto Rican immigrants seeking new lives in New York City.  Instead, they find that American dreams are just as illusory as any, and without the heart to tell their families back home the sobering truth. 

This is another song of danger, punctuated by growling and bestial guitar licks of an urban jungle, with a chatty and panicked muted trumpet that gives voice to the immigrants’ desperation. Donald Fagen’s delivery is without its usual detachment, joined by stalwart backing singers Sherlie Matthews, Venetta Fields, and Clydie King who make this track soar as a sympathetic chorus to enhance the drama. 

Listen: The Royal Scam 

Kid Charlemagne 

Anti-heroes are Steely Dan’s bread and butter, with the one in this song perhaps their greatest creation. “Kid Charlemagne” is a little movie about a meteoric rise and an Icarian fall inside of five minutes. Once again, the music is ebullient and celebratory throughout the soaring highs and the inevitable lows in a story about an innovative hero celebrated in one era and then reviled as a villain in another, seemingly overnight; a beloved outlaw story, taking on mythical proportions.

True to the spirit of that, guitarist Larry Carlton lays down a part that’s now known as his greatest and most recognized instrumental contribution. The solo was a hard-won result, recorded in sections to the satisfaction of Becker and Fagen’s famous ears for precision, and characteristic of their reputations for taking persnickety, painstaking measures in the studio to serve their material. 

Listen: Kid Charlemagne 

Aja 

By 1977’s Aja, Steely Dan reached the pinnacle of the sound for which they’d searched since the beginning. They even managed to score a few radio hits in the process. On the title track, they go beyond the hit single format and expansively stretch out, delving into fusion-inspired instrumental interplay between musicians who were at the top of their instrumental trees by 1977. 

Nimble guitar lines are supplemented by mallet percussion that evokes the Chinese music heard in the banyan trees sung about in the verses. The legendary Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone solo provides a connection to the Sixties jazz that inspired Becker and Fagen from the start. On a song about brief contentment in a life that’s otherwise fraught, this tune is the most sophisticated on an album that proved the effectiveness of Steely Dan’s meticulous approach as record-makers. 

Listen: Aja 

Josie 

With its labyrinthian and vaguely menacing jazz intro, “Josie” is Steely Dan’s version of a best girl in the world-style song so common in pop. In this incarnation, she’s the local girl who makes good; formidable, but also easy to love. From where is Josie returning? The fight circuit? A world tour? Prison? It doesn’t matter. She’s the pride of the neighbourhood; untouchable and unimpeachable. 

Chuck Rainey’s bass shines like a beacon here, locked in with Jim Keltner’s drums for a satisfying and earthy R&B groove. True to form, the song slyly ventures into jazz in places, only to return to the slick rock beat that keeps everything grounded. This is one of Steely Dan’s most popular and most danceable hits, issued during the height of disco and capturing its Saturday night spirit without becoming just another stylistic interpretation of it. 

Listen: Josie 

Peg 

This jubilant 1977 Steely Dan hit single hides the seediness behind the camera’s flash, its glare outstripped by the darkness between shutter falls. Fagen voices the fawning narrator, stroking his subject’s ego as he exploits her image for his own self-serving purposes. This is a thoroughly L.A. song about wide-eyed stardom-seekers and the opportunists that gravitate toward them to take what bounty they can. 

Saxophonist Tom Scott’s now-iconic riff is actually played on a lyricon, the equivalent of a woodwind synthesizer that provides an essential layer of artifice. Chuck Rainy and Michael McDonald stand out again, contributing buoyant basslines and multilayered backing harmonies respectively. They’re only outdone by Jay Graydon’s slippery and fluid guitar solo, a part he earned after a six-hour session at the pleasure of Becker and Fagen, beating out seven (!) other top flight sessioners while doing so.  

Listen: Peg 

Babylon Sisters 

A recurring theme on 1980’s Gaucho, “Babylon Sisters” is a tale of a man who goes for a cotton candy affair with a younger woman and a life of excess well past his prime against the advice of his friends. This leads to a point of no return that will cost him more than he can afford. Another chapter in the story started in hit single “Hey Nineteen”, this track is in turn a study of a generation slipping into a world no longer made for them. 

The interplay between Donald Fagen’s lead and the dulcet backing vocals which include rising star Patty Austin is an irresistible highlight. The “you got to shake it, baby” section on the fade voices the struggle of the narrator as he fights against the inevitable. Incorporating a reggae pulse as it meets with Ellingtonian jazz, this is Steely Dan at their most refined and intricate. 

Listen: Babylon Sisters 

Cousin Dupree 

After taking over a decade off, Steely Dan returned by 1993 as a live act. Toward the end of that decade, they were ready for the studio again, producing the Grammy-winning Two Against Nature in 2000. “Cousin Dupree” found that they could still write a well-crafted sleazy dude story, this one concerning a couch-riding wastrel with (very!) unwholesome designs on his attractive cousin. 

For such an unsavoury story, the music is effusive and downright fun, with Walter Becker taking the bluesy and loose lead guitar parts himself. Fagen embodies the central character with a command of R&B and jazz singing that makes one forget about the song’s implications if one isn’t careful. This was their comeback single, a concentrated dose that comes complete with a truly dubious narrator that listeners would do well not to side with.  

Listen: Cousin Dupree 

Things I Miss the Most 

On 2003’s Everything Must Go, “Things I Miss the Most” is the perfect coda to the Steely Dan catalogue. It finds a man reviewing his once privileged and indulgent life as time’s weight bears down on him. Were this any other band, it might be a straightforward song about loneliness and even regret. But with Steely Dan, one can’t help but think there’s an element of just desserts in there somewhere. 

Walter Becker takes up bass duties as he’d done on their early albums, with guitars laying down melodic soul-jazz lines as horns breeze in an out. Teaming up with engineer Roger Nichols one last time, there’s a retrospective wistfulness here on this highlight from the last Steely Dan record, finding them in a looser mood while still presenting highly suspect characters as they’d done since their debut over thirty years before as they carved out their own niche. 

Listen: Things I Miss the Most 

*** 

Runners up and bubbling under:  

• Do it Again 
• Reelin’ in the Years 
• The Boston Rag 

• Show Biz Kids 
• Razor Boy 
• Rikki Don’t Lose That Number 
• Pretzel Logic 
• Parker’s Band 

• Black Cow 
• Bad Sneakers 
• Green Earrings 
• Haitian Divorce 
• Home at Last 

• Deacon Blues 
• FM 
• Hey Nineteen 
• Gaucho 
• Here at the Western World 

• Janie Runaway 
• Godwhacker 

*** 

Steely Dan’s catalogue is celebrated and denigrated for all the same reasons – its sonic precision, its sardonic detachment, and its obnoxiously/impressively high levels of musicianship. That’s the thing about this band. These very same elements are the things that people love and people hate about them, depending on which side of the room one is standing. It’s extraordinary how that seems to play out. 

Yet it’s this room-splitting quality that proved the validity of their path seemingly envisioned from the start to mix their influences into something unmistakable. Over a long career, it reveals that Becker and Fagen were singular musical visionaries with compelling authorial voices in both capturing and outlasting their era, going beyond the labels attached to them, and defying imitation. 

Learn more about them at steelydan.com. 

Enjoy!

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#20GreatSongs #70sMusic #DonaldFagen #JazzRock #softRock #SteelyDan #WalterBecker