Still A God

Sting’s new album – the first collection of original material he’s produced in a decade (?!) – was released this week. On Tuesday night, I lay in the candlelit Ocean Room and listened to The Last Ship.

Magical.

I may be prejudiced, therefore this is no surprise, but the man can do no wrong. From the days of him heading up The Police, I have listened to him narrate Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, sing Elizabethan madrigals, play jazz-infused reggae and reggae-infused jazz, and seen him front everything from a three-man rock band to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I have read his autobiography, his book of lyrics, watched his films, bought his winter album (can’t call it a Christmas collection because it really isn’t), and snapped up all his solo work. I admit, I gave away Mercury Falling, but like his guitarist buddy, the inimitable Dominic Miller, I neither understand nor share his fascination with country music. That album sparked my fear that his genius had peaked with The Soul Cages, which remains my favourite of his albums and, in a funny way, was his first step on the path to writing the soundtrack to his first musical, set to premier on Broadway in September 2014.

Magical.

He has always written poetry and put it to music. Now he speaks for characters more than for himself, and that’s what makes the story songs so powerful. This album is a story about people, about leaving home and coming home, about love and loss, and smack in the middle of it is the heart that kept his hometown beating for so many years: the shipbuilding industry. It’s wonderful and beautiful and romantic and sad and ancient and elegant and thoughtful and exactly where Sting as an artist is meant to be. Even his liner notes are inspiring! He talks about what moved him to write this album and how he’s grown as a songwriter. He even mentions The Soul Cages as being coldly received except by a group of particularly fervent fans to whom he fondly refers as the “recently bereaved or the chronically melancholy” –neither category into which I fall, by the way.

It’s not a car stereo album. It’s not a housecleaning album. It’s not a background music album. It may not even be a writing album. It’s a lie-in-a-candlelit-room-and-picture-it-in-your-mind album. It’s a dance-though-you-feel-like-crying album. It’s an is-it-over-already??? album. I was transported by his voice and his music to another time and place, and experienced something deeply profound as a result.

Magic.