138. The Police - Outlandos d'Amour

I see you've sent my letters back
And my LP records and they're all scratched

This album spoke to me. From the moment I heard that line and remembered when Bobby gave me my albums back and yea, they were scratched, I knew the Police knew me. So, I never fell in love with a hooker and I wasn't born in the 50's and maybe I kept saying "Bologna" instead of "So Lonely," but this was the band for me.

Really, no one else was making music like this. This was, in my little piece of suburbia a time of hard rock (Van Halen) and a time of punk (The Ramones). What were the Police? Were they a little of both? Next to You, So Lonely and Peanuts had punk stylings, but there was something more to them, something broader than punk and deeper than rock. It was music. It was the arrangements of the songs that set them apart from whatever we were listening to at the time. The drumming was richer, the rythmns jazzier, the whole sound fuller.

This was and always will be my favorite Police album. I can put this on and still think of Sting as a cool, punky kind of rocker dude instead of the self-important schmaltz factory he began. Plus, there's Roxanne, which is the song we use in our family to torture my sister, whose husband's first wife was named Roxanne. Thanks, Sting.

Favorite song: Peanuts
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