STING IN TALE
Still rocking at 65
>> Like most album covers, the image for Sting’s 57th & 9th is an artful creation, a stylised shot of him crossing the titular intersection in New York City.
It is, however, based on truth: Sting really did cross that intersection daily during the several weeks he spent making his 12th solo album at two recording studios in the area.
“That was a wonderful part of the process, living in New York and walking to work every day, and having that privilege of walking to work,” the 65-year-old British musician said. “It’s rare now, walking to work. Nowadays most people have to commute or you’re stuck at home behind a computer.
“Actually walking to work was a very noble and useful thing to me. New York is a stimulating city in every way, and I find walking, the binary act of walking, creative anyway.”
57th & 9th, which debuted at No 9 on the Billboard 200 when it was released in November, is a notable album in several ways. Produced by Martin Kierszenbaum, it’s Sting’s first non-thematic album since
Sacred Love (2003), following excursions that ranged from the medieval music of
Songs from the Labyrinth (2006) to the stage musical The Last Ship (2013), which chronicled the shipyard culture of Sting’s hometown — Newcastle, England.
Much has been made of his return to rock ‘n’ roll, but Sting himself called it much ado about nothing.
“Well, there was no overriding concept, which I suppose is the biggest difference, but I don’t really know what people are on about saying it’s my first rock/pop album in however many years,” said Sting, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee with his former band, the Police. “I think that’s just a record-company marketing tool. Rock ‘n’ roll or pop music is part of my DNA, and every time I make a record, to a certain extent, less or more, it’s rock ‘n’ roll or pop.”
It was made a bit differently than other Sting records, however. Like many of his peers, Sting is no stranger to open-ended recording schedules and the passage of years between albums. For 57th & 9th, however, he began working last summer and set himself a hard-and-fast deadline to finish.
“I think that having that pressure to make a record in a short amount of time was a helpful one,” he explained. “Normally I do have a very open-ended remit: ‘It’ll be released when I’m finished’ or ‘It’ll be written when I feel like writing it.’ This one I said, ‘OK, we’ll have a record by this day and we’ll have it on the street by Christmas.’” Why?
“My feeling about creativity is that it is very, very mysterious, and it’s very difficult to catch the animal and you’re hunting for it all of the time,” Sting said, “so you have to change your methods the whole time because it does too. You have to trick it somehow, or trick yourself into finding it.
“So approaching it from a different angle, a different method than you’ve used before, always reaps a benefit,” he said. “You can’t just rely on pushing the same buttons in a maze like a monkey will — otherwise you wind up with the same banana, and I’m not really interested in getting the same banana every time.”
The songs on 57th & 9th were written “kind of subconsciously,” Sting said, and encompass his usual wide range of styles and subject matter. The lead single, I Can’t Stop Thinking about You, sounds like a love song but actually is about that process of chasing creative ideas. One Fine Day
addresses climate change, while Inshallah
is a Middle Eastern refugee’s plea.
50,000 was inspired by the deaths of so many musicians in the first half of 2016 and even during the recording of the album, notably those of David Bowie and Prince.
“It was a terrible, terrible year,” Sting said. “I’m 65. The character in the song, although he’s not me necessarily, shares a lot of my anxiety, a lot of my life, what it’s like to be a 65-year-old man having been a rock star and looking back on those times.”
Sting also is changing things up a bit for his shows promoting 57th & 9th. After taking out larger bands for his recent collaborative tours with Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, and bringing along an entire orchestra for his “Symphonicity” tour in 2010, he’s pared back to a quartet this year, initially playing smaller venues with plans to grow as the tour goes on.
Meanwhile Sting has some other creative endeavours on tap — most notably the continuing life of The Last Ship, whose Broadway run ended after only 33 performances in 2014. Nevertheless last fall a production sailed into Salt Lake City, where Sting joined the cast for one show, and The Last Ship is headed to England in the near future.
“I’m very proud of that play,” he said. “The great thing about a play is that you can constantly work at it. You can constantly evolve it, which is closer to my own art form, if you like, of songwriting and how songs can evolve.
“It’s not traditional Broadway fare,” Sting conceded. “It was not meant to be, in my opinion, so perhaps Broadway was the wrong place for it. But people who did see it did have a great fondness for it, and so do I.
“It was probably one of the most satisfying five years of my life, and I would do it again in a minute.”