"Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" by The Police
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An ostinato is a melodic motif that repeats over a moving bass part. The repeating notes sound different as the notes around them change. Ostinatos appear in all sorts of popular music, which goes to show there's a difference between hearing a musical term and hearing of it. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you've joined me to talk about songs written around ostinatos, songs written without ostinatos, and songs where the ostinato is obligato. ♪

Strong Songs is an independent podcast. I don't have an editor or a team of writers I can call in to help me out. It's just me in the studio making each episode by hand just for you. So if you'd like to support me making it, go to patreon.com slash strong songs.

On this episode, we're talking about a band chosen by all of you, specifically all of you who support Strong Songs on Patreon, who get to pick one artist per season for me to cover on the show. Good news, you picked a really strong one this time, so let's slide down the bass, layer some keys, and get it done. ♪

Music is magic. I truly do believe that. You can break down music as much as you want, diagramming song forms and writing out chord progressions, identifying the various frequencies that vibrate in harmony and in tension with one another. But at that point, the spell has already been cast. It's already passed you by. If you want to see the magic of music firsthand, all you have to do is sit down and make some.

Because every time a person sits down to make music, every time they turn a thought into something real or convert a melody in their head into a melody played on an instrument, a spark fires, a magical spark, and a transformation takes place. Some of the best bands don't go into the studio with a strong sense of what the song they're working on is going to sound like in the end.

They may have a demo or a sketch or just an idea. And when they begin the work of spinning it into something real, they're performing an incantation every time.

On this episode, we're going to talk about a piece of music that resulted from just such an unpredictable, unusual set of circumstances. A spell of a song that began as a quiet, acoustic incantation, then grew to become something bigger than ever could have been predicted by the four musicians who gave it life. And as we learn about this unusual song, we'll learn about the equally unusual band that recorded it, and about the musical magic that flows through every note, every melody, and every rhythm that they played together.

Yes, it is time to talk about the police and their 1981 hit, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. So long.

I am so excited to finally talk about this band on Strong Songs. Stuart Copeland on drums, Andy Summers on guitar, and the one and only Sting on bass, also known as The Police, joined by a fourth musician on this track only. ♪

This episode is the result of this season's Patreon bracket vote. 32 artists entered the ring, and in the end, only one of them would get an episode in season 7. You all spoke pretty clearly that you wanted an episode about the police. So here we are. Let's not waste any more time on preamble. There's a lot to talk about, so let's get into it. This is just too much tragic, it goes on.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic was recorded for The Police's fourth studio album, 1981's Ghost in the Machine. It was written by Sting, the band's bassist and lead singer, in an unusual process that wasn't really reflective of The Police's general songwriting approach, yet in some ways it perfectly reflected the eclectic, freewheeling way that the trio made music. ♪

The first version of Every Little Thing was actually recorded by Sting several years earlier in a 1977 demo for the band Strontium 90, which he, Summers, and Copeland formed along with Mike Howlett. It's a nice version of the song, though very straightforward musically.

It's a big enough umbrella But it's always me that ends up getting wet Lacking the police-y sharp elbows that the final version would throw in abundance. The little thing she does is magic Everything she do just turn me on Even though my life before was tragic My love for her goes on and on

It really is nice, though, and worth listening to. Apparently, Sting initially conceived of this as a song he would use on a solo recording, and only later decided to take it to the police to turn it into a police song.

As the band began work on Ghost in the Machine, they wanted to get farther away from their label reps to minimize interference. So they relocated to the Caribbean, with primary recording of the album being done at Air Studios in Montserrat. The police would produce the album themselves, along with acclaimed English producer Hugh Padgham.

Padgum these days is known for his work with past strong songers like XTC, Peter Gabriel, and Phil Collins. Well, I haven't done a Phil Collins episode yet, but it'll happen. I know my life before was tragic. Now I know my love for her goes on and on and on. Hey.

Shortly after the album's release, MTV ran a pretty cool feature on the creation of the record, sending pianist Jules Holland down to interview the police about their process. The whole segment is worth a watch, I'll link it in the show notes. But related to this particular song, I thought it was interesting what Sting had to say about his writing process and how he tends to start with titles first.

And when you've got a reasonable structure written with a chorus, you go to the big pile of lyrics, which you write all the time. You can write them anywhere. You can write them at a bus stop. You can write them in the pub.

And you just look through them and you see Message in a Bottle. That's an interesting title, because I write from titles. I don't write the first line of a song. It's a mistake, because then you have to come up with a second one. If you write backwards from the chorus line, which is usually the hook, then you usually come up with it. So I had this Message in a Bottle. What's Message in a Bottle about? It's usually about some guy with raggy trousers and a beer on a desert island. Hope that someone gets my message in a bottle, yeah.

Message in a bottle, yeah

I've found that that approach is often a good one. You start with the title, which doubles as a central thematic idea, and then you work backward from there. And I definitely agree that writing the first line of the first verse can be challenging. So we can imagine Sting writing that title, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, over that chorus chord progression, and it's easy to imagine the rest of the song unfolding from there.

In that same MTV feature, there's also a neat bit where Sting picks up an upright bass and he, Holland, and eventually Andy Summers all work their way through pretty swingin' blues. I'd always known that Sting was a jazz nerd, but it's fun to see him walking the walk, as it were. ♪

So every little thing she does had already had a bit of an unusual path to air studios, given that Sting had written it so many years earlier. But the differences didn't end there. There was a second demo of this song that Sting recorded in Quebec with Jean Roussel on keyboards, and it was that version, not the earlier acoustic guitar version, that he brought to the studio to see what Summers and Copland would make of it.

That demo has proven more elusive than the acoustic guitar one. I at least can't find a version of it online, though I've found a few people claiming that they have a copy of the demo on YouTube. I actually don't think that any of the ones that I've heard on YouTube have actually been the demo. However, you have actually already heard that demo or at least parts of it.

By all accounts, Sting's demo was already really good, and the band decided to keep much of it intact, including Sting's lead vocals for the version that they put on the album. Summers and Copeland simply worked out their parts along with the demo, and later in the process, Roussel came down to Air Studios and re-recorded a bunch of his piano and synth parts.

That wasn't an unheard of approach for them to take. Both Copland and Sting profess a love of writing music with a drum machine, and none of them seem too attached to any one single way of writing or recording songs. ♪

I recommend sitting down and listening all the way through Ghost in the Machine. It is an unusual and really interesting album, and every little thing she does is magic is definitely an outlier in terms of style, instrumentation, and just overall vibe. ♪

This is "Invisible Sun," another well-known song off the record. And while it's still the same band, it's just a very different energy from every little thing.

A big part of that is due to a major instrumentational change on Every Little Thing. Jean Roussel played a ton of keyboard parts on the song, and it was a huge change from the Police's established sound, with Sting on bass, Copland on drums, and Andy Summers providing most of the riffs and harmony on guitar. Ghost in the Machine was already experimenting with some new sounds. Sting actually plays quite a bit of saxophone on this album, which I, of course, have to approve of.

But even by those standards, Every Little Thing was a significant departure. By many accounts, Summers was displeased with the song overall, and I can understand why. He played some nice guitar parts on the finished record, and he crushes it when they play it live. But he didn't want to let it go.

but there really just isn't that much room for him in the arrangement on the record. And I do just want to say, since I'm not going to get to talk about him that much on this episode, Andy Summers is a great guitarist and a great writer. He's responsible for some of the great modern guitar riffs, from that moody riff you were just hearing on Invisible Sun... to the verse riff on another definitive Police song, 1983's Every Breath You Take.

And I gotta say, if you're the guy who recorded this guitar part, congratulations, you will forever sit at the table of guitar greatness. Every breath you take

This song, easily the police's most famous song, is off of Synchronicity, which was released in 1983 as the follow-up to Ghost in the Machine. Synchronicity is a killer record. I love it. I did a lot of police listening while working on this episode, and I have to say I hadn't really internalized how brief their run was. They made five albums from 1978 to 1983, and they called it quits shortly after Synchronicity was released.

Sting launched his successful solo career shortly after that, and given that I spent a lot of my childhood listening to his music, his time with the police kind of just bled over into his solo career for me, and I just hadn't internalized where the division between the two took place.

But the Police's main recording run, yeah, it was pretty brief. And they've, of course, reunited and played together many times in the years since then. But listening to their five studio albums in order helped me get a much stronger picture of them as they were, an experimental and unusually fearless band that merged a variety of underappreciated and underexplored musical styles into something much harder to pin down than their biggest hits would suggest. ♪ I feel so good ♪ ♪ I long for your heart, baby ♪

So as we get into our analysis of Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, I do want you to keep in mind that no one song could capture every facet of the police. They were far too idiosyncratic and searching of a band for that to be possible. And after you finish this episode, I hope that some of you will go on a police listening journey, starting with 1978's Outlandos d'Amour all the way up to 1983's Synchronicity.

Okay, let's get into our analysis and see if we can find out what makes this song work. ♪

Every little thing she does is magic is in the key of D, though like a lot of recordings from the 70s and 80s, the final master is raised just a hair above that. I've retuned the recording for this episode to get it to match up with the instruments that I'll be using for my recreations. So we'll be squarely in the key of D. ♪

There isn't really an intro to this song, which actually tracks with the fact that it was recorded straight off of Sting's demo. It just begins right at the start of the verse, and it's a very strong way to begin. I talk a lot about directionality on Strong Songs, and the verse to Every Little Thing is moving resolutely in a single direction. ♪

It's climbing up. It is a steady upward climb, just four notes, followed by a reset to climb those same four notes again. So that's the first thing that I want you to hear before we begin picking a part and recreating any individual parts. Just that steady ascent. Focus on the bass. It goes G, A, B, C sharp. Then back to G to do it again.

Those four notes, the first four notes of a G major scale with the fourth note, C raised a half step to C sharp, outline a tonality that has come up enough times on Strong Songs that it should no longer be a surprise to anyone. And that would be Lydian, the fourth mode of major, more commonly thought of as major with a sharp four. ♪

So why does Lydian keep turning up in all these pop songs that we talk about? Well, part of it is because pop songs so often go to the forechord.

We're in the key of D major, and a ton of pop songs in the key of D will go to a G chord, the four chord. It's one of the most common chords in popular music. The key of D has an F sharp and a C sharp, while the key of G changes that C sharp to a C natural. But if you don't change the C, it actually sounds really good, because it's Lydian.

So if you're writing a song in D major and you go to the four chord to G, it's actually very natural to just keep playing a D major scale and keep that C sharp going without even really thinking about it. And suddenly you're playing Lydian.

So this G Lydian sound, which is the tonal heart of the verse to every little thing she does is magic. Well, calling it G Lydian makes it sound more complex than it is. It's really just in the key of D major, the key of the song. They've just put a G in the bass and really emphasize those first four notes of the G Lydian scale. Just G, A, C sharp. ♪

However you think of it, it is a striking and interesting sound. It's restless and a little bit unnerved. Four notes separated by three whole steps climbing to an uncertain destination. ♪

So let's start our recreation with the bass, played by Sting. Sting was a fan of the Fender P bass, and on this tune it sounds like he's actually playing a fretless bass, which lets a player slip and slide more around on the neck and approach the instrument a little bit more like an upright acoustic bass, which also does not have frets. I do not have a fretless bass, nor do I have a good fretless bass sample library, so we're just going to make do with a regular old sampled electric bass. It's going to be fine.

At this point, you know what he's playing. Let's continue to build the foundation by adding in some drums. Stuart Copeland is a really interesting drummer, as gifted a conceptual artist as he was a technical one, which is another way of saying the guy had chops, but what makes him so interesting, to me at least, is the decisions that he would make, the ways that he chooses to subdivide grooves differently.

across the drum kit. That's evident from the very start of Every Little Thing. Copland is famous for his intricate and idiosyncratic hi-hat patterns, and he's on those before the downbeat even hits. This is his drum track, isolated by Logic's stem splitter, and I want to start by counting along and noticing where he's putting everything. Here we go. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

Do you hear how he's emphasizing three with his kick and snare? One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

So here on Strong Songs, I tend to break grooves into three components: the thump, the pop, and the sizzle. On a drum kit like Copeland's, the thump is usually the kick drum down low, the pop is the snare higher up offsetting the thumpy kick, and the sizzle is the cymbals filling in the space between thumps and pops with high frequency subdivision.

Copland is the master of the sizzle, which of course means he's also the master of the thump and pop, and he's very creative with how he places those lower elements in order to make the most of a full groove. All three members of the police have talked quite a bit about their clear reggae influence, and you can hear that influence all over each of their records. Their second album, 1979's Regatta de Blanc, literally just translates to white reggae. Giant steps I walked

One of the defining rhythmic elements of reggae music is what's known as the drop. Instead of having a steady backbeat in the drums with a snare or other hit on the two and the four, reggae will frequently only have a hit on the three. So this becomes this. In that MTV segment, Jules Holland asks Copland why he sounds so different from other drummers, and Copland gives a pretty straightforward answer.

I suppose it's because I've stolen all my licks from different sources. You see, all the licks, they all get passed back and forth, most of them. And the trick is to find new ones and turn them around a little bit, camouflage them a little bit, and express yourself with the same sticks and the same cymbals and the same configuration of things to bash with new ways of doing it. And my source of licks has been South America and, of course, the West Indies.

Together and we'll arrive.

He goes on to outline the exact pop displacement that I just explained. He actually does a little mini Strong Songs right there in the drum room, demonstrating a backbeat and so on. It's really cool. And that's where this distinct pulse on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic comes from. It's a pulsing hi-hat sizzle supported by a reggae drop, first on the snare with a cross stick rather than a direct hit on the snare drum itself, and then quickly that is joined by the kick drum.

However, in recreating the drum part, I quickly noticed something else happening. Listen to the hi-hat here. Kinda sounds like there's two hi-hats, right? Now I'm not sure if this is actually just two hi-hat parts that Copland recorded separately, or a delay, delaying the initial part and having it echo a second time, panned over to the right. Whatever it is, it's a cool effect and it creates this bouncy, doubled feeling through the entire verse.

I think it's just a delay, so this is my recreation with no delay. And now let's add some delay. There we go. So that's the bass and the drums sorted. Next let's look at all of the elements that are mirroring the bass's steady upward climb, namely the guitar, the piano, and the synthesizer. The thing that really stands out is the synthesizer.

I'm pretty sure that that's Jean Roussel playing a Moog synthesizer, but I can't be 100% because there's a lot of possible synths for any given sound on this album. Roussel is also doubling that bass line on the piano. There are a bunch of piano tracks overdubbed on top of one another on this tune, to the point that it can be pretty hard to tell which part is where, but I definitely hear that bass line being doubled by at least one of his left hands.

Now, Andy Summers didn't have a lot of space to make his guitar parts fit, but he is playing a couple of cool things on this verse. For one, I think that he is actually doubling that bass line on one of his guitar parts. I can't really hear this in the final mix, but there are some isolated tracks out there taken from rock band video games that have featured this song, and I think that's

and they do seem to have an isolated guitar stem where he is playing that ascending Lydian line in octaves on his guitar. So I went ahead and recreated it. There's a second guitar part in there as well, and it's more of a rhythmic thing. Summers is playing Strat on this recording, and one of his parts is just this classic Strat kind of atmospheric rhythmic thing. He's chucking along with Copland's hi-hat. Let's add my drums to that. Hear how that guitar part works with the hi-hat?

It's delicate. It creates this floating rhythmic counterpoint. So that's all the parts that are doubling that ascending four-note G Lydian bass figure. That just leaves one instrumental part, the piano lead. Roussel's piano part here is what's known as an ostinato, a short motif that repeats over a changing chord progression. He's overdubbed at least one additional piano playing it up the octave, and it's a great part.

An ostinato is a powerful thing musically. There's just something about a figure that repeats over a moving bass line. It feels strong and it feels well-defined. And also, not for nothing, I've always found that ostinatos are easier to play on piano since my right hand can just do the one thing while my left hand focuses on moving.

So that's it for the instrumental parts on this verse. That just leaves the melody and the lyrics written and performed by Sting himself. Oh, I just lose my nerve as I die from the start

Though I've tried before to tell her of the feelings I have for her in my heart, every time that I come near her, I just lose my nerve as I've done from the start.

While Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic is often seen as a love song, like a lot of police songs, it's actually more complicated than that. For all that it exalts in the magical perfection of the object of the narrator's affection, there's a healthy dose of frustration and self-loathing in the lyrics of this song. It's not quite on the level of Every Breath You Take, but it is a song sung and felt from afar, its narrator describing an as-yet unrequited love.

And I've always found the mix on this tune to be odd. It's probably a function of the fact that they used the original demo for the final track, but Sting just sounds so far back in the mix. And while that is true for a lot of Police records from this time period, it seems extra true here. He's singing quite high. Well, I tried before to tell

I mean, it's no joke. That's an F sharp at the top of that line. That's a difficult note to sing, and he just nails it every single time. Sting, of course, has a famously high vocal range, but this is still a pretty intense place for him. But because of the mix, he sounds somewhat distant. Oh, I've tried before to tell the feelings I have for her in my heart.

Alright, so let's listen back to that whole first verse and keep your ears open for everything that we have laid out so far. That ascending figure in the bass, the piano, the guitar, and that Moog synth, each part climbing the first four notes of G Lydian. The drums with that reggae drop in the kick and the snare, and that delayed hi-hat pattern adding subdivision.

along with one of Andy Summers' guitar tracks, that ostinato in the piano lead, repeating the same melody over the moving chord progression, and Sting's vocals climbing in his vocal range but pushed back in the mix as his narrator observes the object of his desire from afar. Ears on, here we go. ♪ Oh, I've tried before to tell the feelings I have for her in my heart ♪

And it's time for the chorus. This chorus is a huge shift in groove and energy from the verse. It's also a big tonal shift in the lyrics, but we'll get into that in a bit.

Musically, the pulse has really changed. Sting and Copland have switched up their bass and drum parts into this sort of Caribbean, almost calypso groove that feels like it's moving in double time compared to the pulse on the verse. Before we get into the recreation, though, because I can't let a bass dive bomb pass unremarked upon, Sting leads into this chorus with the mother of all fretless bass dive bombs...

It rules pretty hard. But okay, let's get into building up a recreation of this chorus, starting with Stuart Copeland. There is a steady backbeat in the drum on 2 and 4, and Copeland has jumped up to his ride bell for this crispy, lifted groove. Sting is playing a pretty groovy bass line here as well. He has jumped onto Copeland's pulse and is bouncing away. ♪

Meanwhile, Andy Summers is actually skanking on the chorus. It's low in the mix, but he's definitely there over on the right. He's just hitting tight chords on 2 and 4 back and forth between A major and D major, which are the two chords of this chorus. Jean Roussel's piano has also taken a more straightforward approach to this chorus. It's a couple different overdubbed piano parts bouncing back and forth between A and D.

So that's the basics. Let's transition back to the recording and see what else we hear. There's something weird going on in there, right? You hear it? Let's pull the bass and the drums. There's this strange high frequency wash. Let's isolate that a little bit more. I've seen people describe this as steel drums, and it does sound kind of like steel drums.

Steel drums would make sense given where they recorded. It could also be a synthesizer, though, since I've never been able to find an actual steel drum credit for this album. I know the police liked the Oberheim OBX, so I used that to get a sort of similar sound for the recreation. I'm going to call that close enough. Let's transition back to the recording and just keep your ears open for this specific sound and pay attention to how it mixes with the backup vocals. ♪

Listen to how that harmonic ring blends with the backup vocals. On that... This is a pretty chaotic arrangement, but I love how these two parts create this celestial choir. Oh, my God.

All right, so let's listen back to that whole first chorus because it passes by pretty quickly, but there is a lot going on. So keep your ears open for all the new elements that I just outlined. How the drums switch to a steady backbeat on the snare. How the piano and the bass both switch to a bouncy pseudo-calypso kind of a groove with Andy Summers on guitar skanking on two and four over on the right channel.

And catch how that high-frequency steel drum, or maybe it's a synth, rings out above it all, mixing with the backup vocals to create a swirling celestial sound. Alright, here we go. See if you can hear all of that. Very little things she does, every vision she does, just turns a tragic beat on someone else.

I really like that transition into the second verse. They're cruising along, they're going from A to D to A to D, and then out of nowhere they drop onto a B flat, which is a chord that Sting included in his original demo of this song, but sounds pretty different and more dramatic with this kind of pulse under it. ♪

I also like how economical that transition is. It's just two bars, which is half of a normal four-bar phrase, and it leaves you feeling just a touch disoriented as the second verse starts up. That enhances how different the verse feels from the chorus, that magical swirl. I mean, just listen to the lyrics here. How'd you tell a story about some rainy day?

Do I have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met? It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.

Those are some of Sting's most famous lyrics, or at least that's a lyric that I'll always associate with him. And I've always thought of it as pretty romantic. I mean, what's more romantic than a fella offering a lady an umbrella on a rainy day? But again, when I look a little bit more closely at what he's actually saying, it's more complicated. There's this edge to it. The umbrella that he's sharing is big enough for both of them, and yet somehow he always winds up getting wet.

It puts into relief how the verse and the chorus have very different tones, not just musically, but lyrically. The chorus is this exaltation. Every little thing she does is magic. There's a choir behind him. He's singing to the heavens. Everything she does just turns me on. But the verses are more tied to that third line in the chorus, even though my life before was tragic.

They're more grounded in the narrator's reality. There's this great interview with the band in Revolver magazine back in 2000. It was after they'd broken up and while they were considering a reunion. And they talk about a whole lot of things. They talk very candidly with one another. They're clearly very comfortable just airing their grievances, but also just hanging out. And they talk about recording this song.

And Singh says that he went with the word tragic in the chorus because it was hard to find something that rhymed with magic. But it's one of those choices where the lyric winds up really fitting with the overall separate themes of the song and that separation between the chorus and the verse. It pulls the chorus back to reality a little bit because the verses, they tell the tale of a guy who just can't quite seem to get out of his own way. It just can't work out for him. He's cursed to never be able to make it happen again.

however strongly he may feel. This is also evidently a lyric that Sting has remained attached to. Not only does it turn up during the nifty and kind of odd fade-out at the end of this recording, it's a fun lyrical callback and a pretty cool way to end a song in general.

And Sting evidently agrees because that same phrase would reappear more than a decade later on Sting's 1993 solo album Ten Summoners Tales at the end of another one of his songs, a song called Seven Days, which of course is in five. Right here. I have to turn the sun

And in this song, Sting is yet again assuming the role of a man overcome by love, but unwilling to actually do anything about it. It's an interesting parallel for sure. Also, this song is just really good. It's always the end of the day.

This second chorus starts much the same as the first, but it has a more elaborate transition at the end, which sets up the bridge.

The bridge is divided into two halves. The first half floats, suspended in an indecisive daydream. The second half builds as the lead singer's anxiety pushes his dreams aside. Must he always be alone?

So yeah, the arrangement of the bridge is driven by the emotional contours of the lyrics. It begins with a bit of a daydream as the narrator makes this fanciful, old-fashioned resolution to call her up a thousand times a day and ask her if she'll marry him.

But then, as the arrangement shifts, he realizes that he's kidding himself. "But my silent fears have gripped me," he sings, "long before I reach the phone, long before my tongue has tripped me. Must I always be alone?" I bet some of you out there didn't realize that this is actually a pretty anguished song. I'm rooting for the guy, but dang.

Alright, so we're back in recreation town. Let's recreate each part on the bridge. On the first half of the bridge, the drum groove is pretty similar to the groove from the verse. Lots of hi-hat action, but actually no snare drum, just sizzle and thump in the kick. The bass and the piano are moving through a variation of their patterns from the verse. Instead of G Lydian, they're now moving through G minor. ♪

In Roussel's right hand, he's playing a piano ostinato that's similar to the one that he played on the verse, it's just been moved down a step to match with the new harmony. It sounds like this. There's a second piano part as well, it's pretty cool. Let's just hear the pianos. And take out the low notes. It's really cool, it's this kind of minimalist thing. I love how these two parts both fit and don't fit together. Last instrument I want to add to my recreation is this unusual synth part.

There's a synth just holding a high D. It's basically just a sine wave. I think I answered a question about this on a Mailbag episode a while back. Anyways, it's an interesting choice, but it works. All right, let's transition to the second half of the bridge. Copland has elaborated his popless groove by starting to play all four beats on the kick drum. There's also a synthesizer swell, maybe the Moog, maybe the Oberheim.

And Summers begins playing these nice delayed arpeggios between the two chords they're playing, B flat and C. Add the bass and the sine wave and the piano and you're cooking. So now let's transition back to the original recording and keep an ear out for everything that I just laid out. It's a dense arrangement and it can be hard to hear each individual element, but if you really open up your ears, you'll start to pick out more than you maybe thought that you could.

I resolved to call her up a thousand times a day and ask her if she'll marry me some old-fashioned way. But my silence feels a brick me. Longer I reach the floor, wonderful nights on a master plane. Must I ask?

Okay, last thing. I do have to call out that synth at the very end of the bridge doing what amounts to the opposite of Sting's dive bomb leading into the first chorus. Before this last chorus, some ungodly spaceship synth sound builds to this massive final chord. ♪

You know, it actually reminds me of the THX sound that would play at THX certified theaters back in the 80s and 90s. This is when you knew you were in for a good time at the movies. It kind of sounds similar, you know? I didn't try to recreate it myself since it's really one of a kind and I'm not totally sure what sound that is, but I wanted to at least note that it happens. It's my style.

The final time through, they play the chorus twice, bridging the gap between the two choruses with a typically understated but killer Copland drum fill. And with that last chorus reprise out of the way, it's time to transition into the outro. And for me, this is where this song achieves liftoff. Oh man. Alright.

The harmony here is the third variation on the post-chorus build, taking the build-up from the end of the bridge and turning it into an extended jam. It's this constant cycle. There's this build-up, then it arrives at D major for a couple of bars, and then it

Then it builds again, then it arrives again, and each time through the cycle, it becomes a little bit more intense than the last time. It's almost gospel in its structure. It feels like the end of a gospel song when the whole choir is in and everyone is just singing hallelujah.

So that build, it moves from a B-flat major, that same chord that the song always goes to at the end of the chorus, B-flat, up to a C, but this time it's a C over F, which gives it this nice lifted sound, to what sounds to me like a D-minor over G, which is a nice lateral movement for the fingers, to A-minor, back to B-flat, and to a final figure, a C over F, to a C, resolving to D-major. ♪

Let's start building the recreation because this part of the song was really fun to recreate. Let's start from the bottom and the top with the drums and the piano. Copland starts out just playing hits, but when they hit the D major, he goes into a backbeat. Needs some bass though, so let's get that in. And you know, it just, it feels like it's missing something. Maybe like some synth arpeggios? There we go.

And what about one more piano ostinato? And I mean, I can already feel myself falling under its spell. ♪

Every little thing's focus on keyboards is never stronger than during this outro. But if you're going to change up your sound for one song to feature a new instrument, you might as well go all the way with it. The various keyboard parts on this outro are just irresistible, in my opinion anyways. They skip along with Copland's hi-hat as the band becomes more and more frenetic.

It all starts with that sequenced synthesizer part, or at least I'm assuming it's sequenced. It feels metronomic enough to me to be sequenced rather than played, though I suppose it's possible that Roussel just played it. I'm not sure which synthesizer this is. I used a Juno 6 for my recreation, but the Juno 6 came out in 1982, a year after Ghost in the Machine. So it isn't a Juno, but I'm familiar enough with that synthesizer to get a sound close to the one from the record, so it'll suffice.

That tick-tocky arpeggiator feel changes the entire pulse of this outro, adding a metronomic verticality that isn't really present in the rest of the recording. In addition to playing the chords to the outro on piano, Jean Roussel overdubs a new piano figure for the outro that really pops. Unison in both hands, two octaves between them. It almost sounds like a montuno. ♪

My paltry recreation can't come close to Stuart Copeland's hi-hat skills, so just listen to him. Hell yeah. And also, just listen to Sting.

That transition right there as Sting moves from singing words to simply singing sounds, it's delineated by one of Stuart Copeland's greatest drum fills. And it isn't some super technical flight down the entire kit. It's this extremely precise machine gun snare rhythm that beautifully sets up his transition from the hi-hat to the more open ride cymbal bell groove that he moves to for this climactic section of the song. ♪

Here we go. And as Sing makes the transition to wordless singing, he finds that he's no longer alone. He's joined by a choir of backup voices as the song reaches its dramatic, cathartic apex. Every little thing she does is magic is an often frustrated song, but here at the end, the magic takes over as the narrator gives into the spell.

And I find that I just don't want this part of the song to end. And can you blame me? The longer I spent with it in the studio, the more I felt like I was performing some sort of conjuring. This outro vamp took on a life of its own, and I couldn't help but start adding ingredients. Like, what if we added some strings? That sounds pretty good. But it needs some kind of groove. Maybe some hand percussion? Maybe some bass?

What about some mallets? Maybe a marimba? Oh, I like that. Let's add some more mallets. Don't you kind of just want to stay here forever? Adding a flute here. Maybe removing some strings there. Then slowly putting the strings back in.

I don't know what it is. I know it has to end eventually, but all the same, can we just close our eyes and sit with it for a second? Okay, let's finish this thing. Any spell worth casting needs a final magic ingredient. So for our final ingredient, let's add some Wind Synth. ♪

Something happened to me while I was working on this part of this episode. It feels a little too perfect to say it was magic, but, well, I think all music has magic in it, so I guess it only makes sense.

I started running through this chord progression and I got caught up in a beautiful loop. This particular set of chords moving in this particular sequence, stacked keyboards and popping drums and above it all, that choir of voices exalting together, a shared symphony of sound. I found myself working through these chords again and again and again and feeling this deep yearning.

A yearning for all the things I want but I can't have. A yearning with a paradox at its heart to make this moment last forever, even as I know that one chord must lead to the next and to the next.

One of the magic things about music is that you never know what's gonna happen when you sit down to make it. And the same thing is true of strong songs. I never really know what's gonna happen when I sit down to make an episode. I never know quite what's gonna strike my fancy or what's gonna cast a spell. This song followed an unusual path from its acoustic origins to a series of studio performances alongside a demo that was just too good to set aside.

No one in the police could have known how it would turn out, which specific performance or part of theirs might add a spark that would ignite the fire under the cauldron. They all just sat down and got to work, and by the time they were finished, they'd made something amazing. Every little thing she does as magic is a strange song with a strange story. It doesn't sound like any other police song, but the magic of music is unpredictable.

It starts in a swirl, and it ends in a spell. I don't know what else you got. I just need you. You, you, you. You, you, you. I don't know what else you got. I just need you.

And that will do it for my episode on Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police. I

I really hope you liked this episode. It wound up being a weirdly profound experience for me to make it. I have a whole new appreciation for this terrific song. And hey, I also had an excuse to pull out my wind synth, the old Roland Aerophone, and play a solo. Thanks so much to everyone who supports Strong Songs on Patreon, and to all of you who voted in the bracket for this season. We had a lot of great contenders this time around, but I am glad the police won because it meant I got to make this episode.

And hey, before too long, we'll be voting on another bracket to pick an artist for season eight. And that season is going to have a little bit of a twist. So if you want to help pick an artist for me to cover in season eight, go to patreon.com slash strong songs and sign up to help support the show.

I have been having a great time making Season 7, and I really appreciate all of you out there who listen. And hey, if you have been enjoying this season, know that I work really hard on it, so consider sharing the show with someone you know who you think might like it, or write a review on whatever app you're using to listen. Reviews really do help the show out, and it's a very easy way to help Strong Songs reach new listeners who would like it if they only knew about it.

All right. Strong Songs is recorded at the Caldera in Portland, Oregon, with production and web support from Emily Williams. Our show art is by the great Tom DJ. For a list of all the tools and software I used to make this show and the recreations on this show, check out the link in the show notes where you'll also find social links, my newsletter, the Strong Songs Discord, all kinds of good stuff. All right. That'll do it for now. Take care and keep listening. ♪