Music Monday: “Murder By Numbers”
This is a track from a live Frank Zappa album where Sting comes out and performs a superb version of “Murder By Numbers”, the last track on the 1983 release “Synchronicity”
It happens to be my favorite song by The Police [there are close – very close – runners up like “Message In a Bottle” and “Hungry For You”] and while the original studio recording is essentially the last released song The Police did as a band together, it stands as a very controversial song, as Sting eludes to in the opening of the above Frank Zappa track.
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martymankins
4 Comments
Can’t go wrong with Zappa or Sting!
Agreed. Both are incredible artists.
I will never forget getting Synchronicity for Christmas the year it came out. When I first heard this song I thought, ‘Wooo! This seems kinda…illicit!’ I loved the darkness, the audacity. It made me think & learn about a particular power of works of art, what they can pull off, how they can stand allowed in reality being or meaning something disallowed; how it is that in this way, art may become a lens onto what we can’t otherwise see.
I fell in love with The Police in grade school, and my future taste and experience would be heavily shaped by them. I didn’t play all my vinyl albums to death, but I had not one Police album that didn’t eventually need replacing. Ghost in the Machine is among my favorite albums of all time, of any genre, and it was one of the first albums I owned.
🙂
Love that you like this song, too. It’s very dark and it’s quite the tale.
As you can see, a close second favorite is from Ghost In The Machine. I played The Police albums so many times from 1979 to 1984.