Synchronicity II
| "Synchronicity II" | ||||||||||
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| Single by The Police | ||||||||||
| from the album Synchronicity | ||||||||||
| B-side | "Once Upon a Daydream" | |||||||||
| Released | October 1983 | |||||||||
| Format | vinyl record (7") | |||||||||
| Recorded | Late 1982 at AIR Montserrat for basic tracks, then January 1983 at Le Studio in Quebec for overdubs and mixing | |||||||||
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| Label | A&M – AM 153 | |||||||||
| Writer(s) | Sting | |||||||||
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| The Police singles chronology | ||||||||||
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"Synchronicity II" is a song by The Police, and the third single from their album Synchronicity. Written by lead singer and bassist Sting, it was released as a single in the UK and the U.S. by A&M Records, reached No. 17 in the UK Singles Chart and No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1983. It featured the non-album track "Once Upon a Daydream" on the b-side. The song was described by People Weekly as "aggressive" and "steely."
The song, which refers to Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity, nominally tells the story of an emasculated husband and harried father whose home, work life, and environment are dispiriting and depressing. In an early stretch of lyrics we find "Grandmother screaming at the wall" (family trouble/mental illness), as well as "mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration, but we know all her suicides are fake" (nagging, unhappy spouse). Later, we hear about humiliation by his boss ("and every single meeting with his so-called superior/is a humiliating kick in the crotch"), all the while he "knows that something somewhere has to break". Meanwhile, something monstrous is emerging from a "dark Scottish lake/loch", a reference to the Loch Ness Monster—a parallel to the father's own inner anguish.
There's a domestic situation where there's a man who's on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol of the man's anxiety. That's a synchronistic situation.
Interpretations of the lyrical content vary widely. Writing in Entertainment Weekly about a 1996 Sting tour, Chris Willman said:
"The late-inning number that really gets [the crowd] galvanized is the edgy old Police staple that has the most old-fashioned unresolved rock tension in it, 'Synchronicity II'—which, after all, is a song about a domestic crisis so anxiety producing that it wakes up the Loch Ness Monster."
Sting explained the theme of the song to Time magazine:
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