Songs that Changed Music: The Police - Message in a Bottle

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Returning to the studio only three months after their debut album’s release, The Police set to work on their second album tightly insync with one another musically. Drummer Steward Copeland explained that recording the second album was a completely different experience than the first: “This time the material wasn't rehearsed but the band was. We knew each other's styles because we'd been playing together constantly for eight months, which we hadn't been doing when we recorded the first album. Reggatta took us three weeks to record. We just went into the studio and said 'right, who's got the first song?”

“Message in a Bottle” was one of the songs presented by Sting, although the song’s captivating guitar riff was not entirely new to the band. They had heard him playing around with it with a different melody while on tour. Guitarist Andy Summers explained in 1981: “Sting had that riff for a while, but there was another tune with it originally. He'd been fiddling about with it during our first American tour. Finally, he rearranged the riff slightly and came up with the song.” After only a week in the studio, the Police premiered the song at a concert at Hatfield Polytechnic for the BBC’s “Rock Goes to College.”

The song’s hypnotic guitar riff kicks off the track with a captivating chord progression that repeatedly denies the harmonic resolution our ears expect it to provide. The constant sonic rejection parallels the longing in the lyrics, and fits nicely with the picture Sting painted of his dejected dog and the song's origins in his book Lyrics:

“I used to play it over and over again to my dog in our basement flat in Bayswater...and he would stare at me with that look of hopeless resignation dogs can have when they're waiting for their walk in the park. Was it that hopeless look that provoked the idea of the island castaway and his bottle? I don't know, but the song sounded like a hit the first time we played it. The dog finally got his walk, and this song was our first number-one in the UK."

The song’s lyrics, however, move beyond this image of the hopeless longing of an island castaway and paint a narrative arch in which the protagonist’s desperate gesture of the message in a bottle results in the unexpected solidarity of “hundred billion bottles” of similarly lonely individuals “washed up on the shore.” The story’s philosophical resolution is as unexpected as the underlying harmonic progression of the song’s guitar riff - never taking us exactly where we expect it to go, but by the time we get there, it feels just right.
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