Hung My Head

I love the song "I Hung My Head" by Sting from his Mercury Falling album.



It's a sad song, but a beautiful one and I've always loved the rhythm in the both the verse and chorus. I think initially what hooked me about the song was the guitar sound. At the time I first heard it, around winter of 1996, I had pulled it out of the library along with a Sarah McLachlan album that had this one really interesting track with a great overdriven gritty guitar sound (maybe "Ice" from The Freedom Sessions) (yeah, overdriven guitar and Sarah McLachlan don't go together, part of what made it so interesting) and Peter Gabriel's Us and So albums. I loved Us and So, the way those records sound is amazing.

Somehow, these sounds remain tied together in my mind, in some kind of sympathetic sound.

All of this is set on a backdrop of some of the other guitar sounds I was drawn to at the time like "One of Us" by Joan Osborne and "Wonder" and "Carnival" by Natalie Merchant, "Counting Blue Cars" by Dishwalla (which owned the radio at the time), and everything by The Gin Blossoms. There was just a lot of really overdriven guitar music on the radio at the time. Not really heavily distorted in my mind, just good, pleasantly-overdriven to gritty guitar sounds in the pop world at the time.

"I Hung my Head" is another instance, and perhaps my favorite of those mentioned here, of that overdriven quality. Here it's much sweeter and with the added effects it's really stirring and gorgeous to me. In fact, the duo of albums coming from Sting at the time, Ten Summoner's Tales" and "Mercury Falling" had some really wonderful guitar sounds to my ear, both then and now.

At any rate, I haven't heard this song in a few years and it was nice to have it pop in my brain and be able to hear it again through the magic that is The Internet.