The Suburban Abyss returns from its summer break with my first-ever guests, record collectors and lifelong music fans Travis Dryden and John O’Neil, who spent an hour with me in Boise discussing the highs and lows of Sting’s recorded output with the Police and as a solo artist.

Travis and John are the two biggest Police fans I know. As younger brother to Travis by nearly a decade, his musical tastes, especially early on, were a huge influence on my exploration of sound. When our family got cable television in 1983, Travis tuned in to MTV as often as he could, and usually I rode shotgun on the couch with him. I was all of 5 years old when the Police released their final studio album Synchronicity, but watching their videos and absorbing their albums via osmosis as they wafted down the stairs from my brother’s bedroom, their music became ingrained in me, and more than any other band, the Police fondly transport me back to this time in my young life. I remain a big fan to this day.

I’m a big fan of this week’s guests, too. I like to stay out of other people’s bedrooms, but I’d venture to say that Travis and John O are not masters of tantric sex – for that matter, neither am I – but they both seem to tan well, so in that way they are not unlike Sting. And like Sting they are thinkers, introspective humans who attempt to make sense of their world through music, film, literature and their own creative explorations. And while the recent release of Sting’s duets album did not qualify as an international war crime, the atrocity of the act nonetheless inspired me to ask Travis and John O to share their thoughts, however fawning or conflicted, on the collected works of the man born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner.

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