Catching the Lyrics

I bought The Police - Every Breath You Take - The Classics CD at a garage sale a couple of weeks ago and have had a great time listening to it ever since. I love a good song and there are plenty of them on this little disc.

While well written lyrics are sheer poetry, truth be told, they are often lost on me. I'm a superficial music listener. As opposed to my sons and husband--true music aficionados--I tend to get caught up in the musicality of a piece. A good melody goes a long way in my book, and being, I suspect, a little ADD, while my head may be bopping to the beat, my mind is often somewhere else.

So while listening to the song "Don't Stand so Close to Me" for what must have been the hundredth time in my life, I was startled to hear the word "Nabokov". I studied Vladimir Nabokov in college and it's the rare writer since who has inspired such awe. He wrote the infamous Lolita, which is a book of genius that strikes terror in the hearts of many. (This would include my former book club, two-thirds of who showed up at our discussion of the book without having read it--too unsavory, too immoral, too dangerous!) Who would use such a word in a song lyric, and what in God's name was this song really about?

My player does not allow me to jump back within the song--a feature I find invaluable on my voice mail at work--so I had to punch my way through the list and start the song again three times (ADD again) before I caught the phrasing. Only then did I understand the brilliance of the song.

Sting wrote the lyrics and I was surprised (again) to find out he'd once been an English teacher. That he went on to fame and fortune fronting the Police and then as a solo act shows what a musical talent he is. But those lyrics, aah, to a writer they say so much more. Only a sensitive, deep thinking, perceptive intellectual could have written those lyrics. I am in awe.