Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

Although the song was recorded in 1981, Sting wrote it as early as late 1976 prior to the formation of The Police.[3] An early (1976) demo of the song can be heard on the Strontium 90 album Strontium 90: Police Academy, which Sting recorded entirely by himself while the song was still fresh in his mind (according to Mike Howlett), using equipment in the loft of Howlett's home in Acton, London which included an acoustic guitar, a bass guitar, an African drum, a TEAC 4-track recorder and some cheap microphones. For Howlett, this demo is "a powerful testimony to the raw, undiluted talent that is Sting".[4] Note that this was prior to the launch of the Portastudio in the late 70s, which Sting would later use for writing and demoing songs for The Police and so on.[5] A second demo was recorded in January 1981 at Le Studio in Morin Heights, Canada, with Nick Blagona engineering:[6]

This was first recorded as a demo, with the piano figure, in a studio in Montreal. I had written the song long before the Police were successful, but it seemed a bit soft for the band at first. But the demo was really great. It sounded like a No 1 song to me. I took it to the band, who were reticent, still thinking it was soft. I was saying, "But listen, it's a hit." We tried to do it from scratch as the Police, but it didn't have the same energy as the demo. After a degree of hair-pulling and torturing on my part, I got the band to play over the top of my demo.

— Sting, The Independent, September 1993[7]

The piano part was added by session keyboardist Jean Roussel, whom Sting would fly over to help re-record the track against the wishes of his bandmates Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland while they were recording the Ghost In The Machine album at AIR Studios, Montserrat.[8] Summers did not approve of Roussel's inclusion in the track, claiming that he was "incredibly pushy" and that "there wasn't room for him. He must have played 12 piano parts on that song alone."[9] Copeland, however, said that Roussel "wasn't pushy ... He was just like us actually."[9]

Feeling that the arrangement of the track was not enough like The Police style, Summers (who recalled, "as the guitar player I was saying, 'What the fuck is this? This is not the Police sound'") and the band tried to "Police-ify" the track by attempting different arrangements and styles, but none of them clicked.[9][10] However, as Copeland remembers, the remaining two members of the band had to overdub onto Sting’s demo in the end:

"I remember saying, 'Okay put up Sting's original demo and I'll show you how crummy it is.' So Sting stood over me and waved me through all the changes. I did just one take, and that became the record. Then Andy did the same thing on the guitar. We just faced the music, bit the bullet, and used Sting's arrangements and demo. Damn."[9]

— Stewart Copeland, Revolver, 2000

In the chorus, Sting, not knowing any other word which would rhyme with "magic," used the word "tragic." Copeland said of this moment, "I remember Sting for years trying to think of a rhyme for 'magic', as in 'Every Little Things She Does Is Magic.' I think the only word he could come up with, apart from 'tragic', was 'pelagic', which means 'ocean going'. There I was in my leather pants and punk hairdo, pondering the distinction between ocean-going and river-going fish." This moment was, in his estimation, implied by scholars to be fairly comical.[9]

• Sting – bass guitar, lead and backing vocals
• Andy Summers – guitars
• Stewart Copeland – drums
• Jean Alain Roussel – pianos, synthesizers, arrangement

• List of European number-one hits of 1981
• List of number-one singles from the 1980s (UK)
• List of number-one mainstream rock hits (United States)

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics