You Might Need a Dictionary To Understand These 5 Songs Written by Sting

Erudition comes naturally to Sting. After all, his career path nearly took him to the halls of education. That ceased when the clarion call of musical stardom beckoned. It guided him to radiant success, both as part of a three-piece ensemble (The Police) and as a solitary artist.

If it seems like our language is a bit flowery, we’re just trying to keep up with our subject. Here are five times Sting impressed us with SAT-worthy vocabulary and literary references.

“Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by The Police from ‘Zenyatta Mondatta’ (1980)

This song, which starts intense and ends up danceable, gave the band a big hit as the first single released off their 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta. And it was one of the earliest examples of Sting reaching deep for an allusion that not everyone in the audience might have recognized. Late in the song, he compares the predicament of the teacher obsessed with one of his students to the “old man in that book by Nabokov.” He’s talking about the controversial novel Lolita, famously made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick.

“Spirits In The Material World” by The Police from ‘Ghost In The Machine’ (1979)

While we’re not going to pretend that any of the words in this song, a hit found on the 1981 album Ghost In The Machine, are all that complicated on their own. But when you consider how Sting piles all these polysyllabic words on top of one another, it becomes clear how impressive a feat it is. At one point, he rhymes “solution,” “evolution,” “constitution,” and “revolution,” without sounding forced. Even more daring is when he manages to connect “jail ya” with the lofty phrase “the rhetoric of failure.”

“Wrapped Around Your Finger” by The Police from ‘Synchronicity’ (1983)

You’ll probably remember the video of this smash off Synchronicity for Sting’s candle-breaking, slow-motion dance. Check out the wild lyrics to this one. There are the highfalutin’ words such as “alabaster.” Then there are the references. Most people know about Mephistopheles. But how about the “Scylla and Charybdis?” He’s talking about a location where ships were supposedly crushed when they tried to split a pair of craggy rocks, personified in myth as monsters. It’s the perfect metaphor for the frustrated protagonist.

“Synchronicity II” by The Police from ‘Synchronicity’ (1983)

Before you even get to the fancy wordplay here, you must acknowledge the deep concept. In the song, Sting elucidates the theme of “Synchronicity” by comparing the soul-deadening routine of an everyman with a monster crawling from the depths. Heady stuff, right? When you get to the actual structure of the lyrics, you’ll be equally awed. Who else was writing couplets like this one in the all-flash 80s?: “Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration/But we know all her suicides are fake.”

“Fortress Around Your Heart” by Sting from ‘The Dream Of The Blue Turtles’

Even once though he left The Police behind, Sting did not give up his penchant for eloquent, involved lyrics. Granted, The Dream Of The Blue Turtles, his first solo record, found him sounding a lot more at ease. But he occasionally reached back for some of the old verbose moodiness. “Fortress Around Your Heart” stands out as the most Police-like track on the album. Thus, it makes sense that he dips back into some of the old lyrical derring-do, including bellicose musings on “siege guns,” “chasms,” and “battlements.”

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