"So Lonely" was written by Sting and is the second track on The Police's debut album Outlandos d'Amour. Lyrically, it's a sardonic broken-heart song; musically it has a reggae flavor, a sound they mixed with elements of pop and punk to give them a distinct signature.
Sting wrote the lyrics while he was in his previous band, Last Exit, then "grafted them shamelessly onto the chords from Bob Marley's 'No Woman No Cry,'" he explained in Lyrics By Sting. "This kind of musical juxtaposition - the lilting rhythm of the verses separated by monolithic slabs of straight rock and roll - pleased the hell out of me. That we could achieve it effortlessly just added to the irony of a song about misery being sung so joyously."
The police could be a bit repetitive in their songs - listen to the end of "Message in a Bottle" for evidence. In this song, the chorus is simply the phrase "so lonely" repeated 12 times. After two repetitions of the chorus, Andy Summers plays and understated guitar solo, then the loneliness kicks in again, with about two minutes of variations on "feel so lonely" repeated over and over. We counted 54 title repetitions in total.
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