Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you
Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you
[Pre-Verse 3]
Oh can’t you see
You belong to me
How my poor heart aches with every step you take
[Verse 3]
Every move you make
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
Since you’ve gone I’ve been lost without a trace
I dream at night I can only see your face
I look around, but it’s you I can’t replace
I feel so cold and I long for your embrace
I keep crying baby, baby please
[Middle-eight]
Ooh…
[Pre-Verse 3]
Oh can’t you see
You belong to me
How my poor heart aches with every step you take
Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake, every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
Every move you make, every step you take
I’ll be watching you
I’ll be watching you
(Every breath you take, every move you make)
(Every bond you break, every step you take)
I’ll be watching you
(Every single day, every word you say)
(Every game you play, every night you stay)
I’ll be watching you
(Every move you make, every vow you break)
(Every smile you fake, every claim you stake)
I’ll be watching you
(Every single day, every word you say)
(Every game you play, every night you stay)
I’ll be watching you
(Every breath you take, every move you make)
(Every bond you break, every step you take)
I’ll be watching you
(Every single day, every word you say)
(Every game you play, every night you stay)
I’ll be watching you
(Every move you make, every vow you break)
(Every smile you fake, every claim you stake)
I’ll be watching you
I’ll be watching you
(Every single day, every word you say)
(Every game you play, every night you stay)
I’ll be watching you
Music video by The Police performing Every Breath You Take (Black and White Version). (C) 1983 A&M Records Ltd.
“Every Breath You Take” is a song by English rock band The Police from their 1983 album Synchronicity. Written by Sting, the single was the biggest US and UK hit of 1983, topping the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart for eight weeks (the band’s only number-one hit on that chart), and the UK Singles Chart for four weeks. It also topped the BillboardTop Tracks chart for nine weeks.
The song is considered to be both The Police’s and Sting’s signature song, and in 2010 was estimated to generate between a quarter and a third of Sting’s music publishing income.[5] In the 1983 Rolling Stone critics and readers poll, it was voted “Song of the Year”. In the US, it was the best-selling single of 1983 and fifth-best-selling single of the decade. Billboard ranked it as the number-one song for 1983.[6]
Sting wrote the song in 1982 in the aftermath of his separation from Frances Tomelty and the beginning of his relationship with Trudie Styler. Their split was controversial. As The Independent reported in 2006, “The problem was, he was already married – to actress Frances Tomelty, who just happened to be Trudie’s best friend (Sting and Frances lived next door to Trudie in Bayswater, west London, for several years before the two of them became lovers). The affair was widely condemned.” In order to escape from the public eye, Sting retreated in the Caribbean where he started writing the song.[10] The lyrics are the words of a possessive lover who is watching “every breath you take; every move you make”.
I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.
Sting later said he was disconcerted by how many people think the song is more positive than it is. He insists it is about the obsession with a lost lover, and the jealousy and surveillance that follow. “One couple told me ‘Oh we love that song; it was the main song played at our wedding!’ I thought, ‘Well, good luck.'”[12] When asked why he appears angry in the music video, Sting told BBC Radio 2, “I think the song is very, very sinister and ugly and people have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it’s quite the opposite.”[13]
According to the Back to Mono box-set book, “Every Breath You Take” is influenced by a Gene Pitney song titled “Every Breath I Take”. Led Zeppelin‘s song, “D’Yer Mak’er” (1973), also contains the words “every breath I take; every move I make”. The song has an AABACABA structure.
The demo of the song was recorded in an eight-track suite in North London’s Utopia studios and featured Sting singing over a Hammond organ.[1] A few months later he presented the song to the other band members when they reconvened at George Martin‘s AIR Studios in Montserrat to work on the Synchronicity album. While recording, Summers came up with a guitar part inspired by Béla Bartók that would later become a trademark lick, and played it straight through in one take. He was asked to put guitar onto a simple backing track of bass, drums, and a single vocal, with Sting offering no directive beyond “make it your own.”[14] Summers remembers:
This was a difficult one to get, because Sting wrote a very good song, but there was no guitar on it. He had this Hammond organ thing that sounded like Billy Preston. It certainly didn’t sound like the Police, with that big, rolling synthesiser part. We spent about six weeks recording just the snare drums and the bass. It was a simple, classic chord sequence, but we couldn’t agree how to do it. I’d been making an album with Robert Fripp, and I was kind of experimenting with playing Bartok violin duets and had worked up a new riff. When Sting said ‘go and make it your own’, I went and stuck that lick on it, and immediately we knew we had something special.
The recording process was fraught with difficulties as personal tensions between the band members, particularly Sting and Stewart Copeland, came to the fore.[1] Producer Hugh Padgham claimed that by the time of the recording sessions, Sting and Copeland “hated each other”, with verbal and physical fights in the studio common.[1] The tensions almost led to the recording sessions being cancelled until a meeting involving the band and the group’s manager, Miles Copeland (Stewart’s brother), resulted in an agreement to continue.[1] Keyboard parts were added from Roland guitar synthesizers, a Prophet-5 and an Oberheim synthesiser.[1] The single-note piano in the middle eight was recommended by Padgham, inspired by similar work that he had done with the group XTC.[1] The drum track was largely created through separate overdubs of each percussive instrument, with the main backbeat created by simultaneously playing a snare and a gong drum.[1] To give the song more liveliness, Padgham asked Copeland to record his drum part in the studio’s dining room in order to achieve some “special sound effects”. The room was so hot, that his drum sticks had to be taped to Copeland’s hands to make sure they didn’t fly off.[1] According to Stewart Copeland:
In my humble opinion, this is Sting’s best song with the worst arrangement. I think Sting could have had any other group do this song and it would have been better than our version — except for Andy’s brilliant guitar part. Basically, there’s an utter lack of groove. It’s a totally wasted opportunity for our band. Even though we made gazillions off of it, and it’s the biggest hit we ever had.
The song had a music video (directed by duo Godley & Creme) loosely based on Gjon Mili‘s 1944 short film Jammin’ the Blues. Shot in black-and-white, the video depicts the band, accompanied by a pianist and string section, performing the song in a darkened ballroom as a man washes the floor-to-ceiling window behind them. Sting performs his part on upright bass rather than bass guitar.
The video was praised for its cinematography; MTV (1999), Rolling Stone (1993), and VH1 (2002) named it as one of the best music videos ever, placing it 16th, 61st, & 33rd in their respective top 100 lists. Daniel Pearl won the first MTV cinematography award for his work on the video.[16] Released in the early days of MTV, Every Breath You Take was one of the earliest videos to enter heavy rotation, a fact that significantly contributed to the popularity of the song. Pop star Richard Marx remembers that “The first video I watched over and over was Every Breath You Take. It was like seeing a Bergman film. Directors usually spelled out every word of the lyrics in a video, but this was the first video I knew that didn’t do that. It was abstract.” According to A&M co-founder Jeff Ayeroff, “[The video for] Every Breath You Take probably cost $75,000 to $100,000, and we sold over 5 million albums. With a good video, the return on your investment was phenomenal.”[17]
Impact
“Every Breath You Take” was released as a single in 1983, with “Murder by Numbers”, a composition by Andy Summers and Sting, on the B-side. “Every Breath You Take” reached the No. 1 spot in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Israel, Ireland, and South Africa. In the 1983 Rolling Stone critics and readers poll, it was voted “Song of the Year”.
Legacy
“Every Breath You Take” quickly established itself as one of the most popular songs in The Police’s repertoire, closing the band’s performances before the encores in the Synchronicity Tour (1983–84) and later in The Police Reunion Tour (2007–08).
Sting performed the song at Live Aid at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1985, with Phil Collins providing additional vocals, to an estimated global audience of 1.9 billion people watching the live broadcast. Sting performed it again, 20 years later, at Live 8.
In 1999, “Every Breath You Take” was listed as one of the Top 100 Songs of the Century by BMI.[18][19] In 2003, VH1 ranked the song the No. 2 greatest Break-up song of all time. And also as of 2003, Sting was still taking in an average of $2000 per day in royalties for the then 20-year-old song.[20]
In 2007 Andy Summers called his photography book I’ll Be Watching You: Inside The Police 1980–1983 after the lyrics of the song.
In October 2007, Sting was awarded a Million-Air certificate for 9 million airplays of “Every Breath You Take” at the BMI Awards show in London, with only Van Morrison‘s “Brown Eyed Girl” a close second at 8 million air plays.[21]
In October 2017 the song was featured at the end of Season 2 of the Netflix thriller Stranger Things during the Snowball dance and also appears on the Sony Music soundtrack that features songs that were used in both season 1 and 2
Accolades
“Every Breath You Take” has been ranked as the 94th best song of all time, as well as the third best song of 1983, in an aggregation of critics’ lists at acclaimedmusic.net.
The song came in at No. 424 in Q‘s list of the “1001 Greatest Songs Ever” in 2003.
In 2004, “Every Breath You Take” was ranked No. 216 in WXPN‘s list of The 885 All-Time Greatest Songs.
In 2005, Blender ranked the song at No. 315 on its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born”.
In 2000, the song appeared at No. 42 on Rolling Stone’s list of “100 Greatest Pop Songs”, compiled by Rolling Stone and MTV music critics to rank songs released since The Beatles’ breakthrough.
In 2015 “Every Breath You Take” topped the poll in ITV‘s “The Nation’s Favourite 80s Number One” show.
VH1 ranked the song No. 46 on the “100 Greatest Songs of the 80s” countdown in its series The Greatest.
Six months after the release of “Every Breath You Take”, singer Ray Parker, Jr. released the single “I Still Can’t Get Over Loving You“, the lyrics of which bore a striking similarity to “Every Breath You Take”, even including the lines “Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you.”[67]
Sting also riffs on the lyrics in his song “Love Is the Seventh Wave“, singing “Every breath you take/every move you make/every cake you bake/every leg you break…”
The Shadows did an instrumental version on Moonlight Shadows (1986).
The Puff Daddy song “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997) samples the guitar, drum, and bass parts of the song, and the chorus is an interpolation of the lyrics.
American Punk Rock band Strung Out covered the song for a collection entitled Before You Were Punk 2, released in 1999.
Swirlies alias group The Yes Girls covered the song on Casio keyboard and guitar on their 2000 album.
