“Driven To Tears” by The Police

"Driven to Tears" sits on the Police's 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta, and it's where Sting first turned his pen on the world outside the band. He wrote it after watching TV footage of starving children in Biafra while the Police toured America in 1979, and he has said the title was literal: the broadcast left him weeping. The song chews on the gulf between rich and poor, jabs at a world that can afford a television set but not food for the hungry, and asks questions it can't answer.

The music is just as taut. Stewart Copeland's drums skitter and snap, Sting's bass prowls with a little synth shading, and Andy Summers carves jagged shapes on guitar. Nigel Gray produced with the band. On classic rock radio it usually runs straight into the next track, "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.