There are those who remember Sting for the commercially popular Desert Rose, and then there are those who, whenever they think of Sting, think of slamming basslines, heavy ska influences, the merging of rock, pop, jazz, funk and blues, and lyrics that would be a great fit in a book of poems. Both of these Stings still exist, but in the former Police man’s 12th album, called 57th and 9th, things are different. He’s back, to rock! And he proved that as he and the band reopened the Bataclan in Paris, one of the sites of the deadly terrorist attacks a year ago.
Named after the corner that housed the studio where the album was recorded, "57th and 9th" as a whole sounds a lot like Sting's old stuff, but that's not a bad thing. It's musically incredible and lyrically wiser, though it also veers into self-importance at times ” just as the old stuff did. Unlike a lot of aging rockers living on past glory, Sting's return to rock 'n' roll from other projects seems driven more by a desire to return to something he loves than the need to make a buck. There's a payoff for waiting.
The first single on Sting's new album, I Can't Stop Thinking About You, sounds like the love child of Police classics Every Breath You Take and Can't Stand Losing You. There are the achy lyrics of the former, which holds up well but has more of a stalker vibe than it seemed to the first time around. And there's the driving bass line of the latter, the style of playing that made Sting's former band one of the best of the 1980s.
Recorded in a period of weeks, the album, his first collection of original songs in more than a decade, has spontaneity but also a rawness. He could have scrubbed a few clichés from the lyrics ” the sands of time on one song, old rockers never die (they just fade away) on another ” but the pulsating rush that was the hallmark of Sting's early work makes up for it. A man who knows how to rock this well can be forgiven. It is good to have him back.
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- On the refugee crisis and what inspired his song, "Inshallah" that pays homage to refugees
Well, the migrant crisis is something that isn't going to disappear tomorrow. It's driven by warfare in the Middle East. It's driven by poverty in Africa. It may be driven by climate change in the very near future. So it's not going to be something can we can hope to end tomorrow. I don't have a political solution, but I feel if there's a solution to it, it has to be grounded in some kind of empathy for those people in those boats. Because we as a species all migrate. We're all migrants. Everyone in this country (America) is a migrant, I'm a migrant, our ancestors were migrants. It's not going to stop, that's what we do.
So I think if we have a feeling of empathy, just a little intellectual exercise of putting yourself in a boat like that with your wife and your children, how does that feel? And I think it's an important exercise if you like.
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- On his decision to open the Bataclan concert with his 1986 hit Fragile
I think it's an appropriate beginning, I think that song has a lot of uses that we never foresaw. I wrote the song in the '80s, I think. But every time something happens, it seems an appropriate song to play on the radio.
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- On the Prince-inspired song, 50,000 on his new album
It was a tough year in my business. A lot of notable cultural icons were taken from us: David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey from the Eagles and many many others. It was shocking. And of course, like all of us, there's a child in me that sees these cultural icons as being somehow immortal. And we all are shocked irrationally when they prove to be very mortal. I am 65 years old, I imagine I've lived most of my life already so it definitely makes you have to accept your own mortality and the song is really about that. It's about someone like me, a rock star looking back on his stadium days, playing to 50,000 people, 100,000, 200,000, in the spotlight and the hubris of that. And then on reflection, wondering where he learned his philosophy. I'm not ready to die at all; I've still got work to do. But an acceptance of it for all of us is a useful thing, because that's the reality.
