Songfacts®:

• "So Lonely" was written by Sting and is the second track on The Police's debut album Outlandos d'Amour. Lyrically, it's a sardonic broken-heart song; musically it has a reggae flavor, a sound they mixed with elements of pop and punk to give them a distinct signature.
• Sting wrote the lyrics while he was in his previous band, Last Exit, then "grafted them shamelessly onto the chords from Bob Marley's 'No Woman No Cry,'" he explained in Lyrics By Sting. "This kind of musical juxtaposition - the lilting rhythm of the verses separated by monolithic slabs of straight rock and roll - pleased the hell out of me. That we could achieve it effortlessly just added to the irony of a song about misery being sung so joyously."
• The police could be a bit repetitive in their songs - listen to the end of "Message in a Bottle" for evidence. In this song, the chorus is simply the phrase "so lonely" repeated 12 times. After two repetitions of the chorus, Andy Summers plays and understated guitar solo, then the loneliness kicks in again, with about two minutes of variations on "feel so lonely" repeated over and over. We counted 54 title repetitions in total.
• In America, "So Lonely" was never issued as a single, but in the UK it was issued in October 1978, around the same time the album was released. By this time, "Roxanne" had been released and flopped, and the next single, "Can't Stand Losing You," topped out at #42. "So Lonely" went nowhere, but in 1979 "Roxanne" finally started getting airplay and audiences started to discover The Police. Their record company took another crack it, re-releasing "Roxanne," "Can't Stand Losing You" and "So Lonely." this time they were all hits, with "So Lonely" reaching #6 on March 15, 1980.
• Some listeners didn't hear the words "So Lonely," and thought Sting was singing "Sue Lawley," the name of a popular BBC TV presenter. "It was played on national television as an homage to Sue, but we didn't complain. Blessings are often unexpected," Sting recalled.
• The music video, directed by Derek Burbidge, follows the band through the streets of Hong Kong and on the subway trains of Tokyo. It was one of several videos they made before MTV. When the network launched, they were already seasoned pros when it came to music videos.
• Sting explained that the songs for Outlandos d'Amour were recorded during late-night sessions in a studio above a dairy in Leatherhead, Surrey, England, before the band was signed to a record label.