The album that gave Sting “confidence” to leave The Police
It’s impossible for anyone to be completely confident in leaving a band. Anyone would be leaving a lot of money on the table if they left their musical siblings behind, but Sting knew that if anyone could say that The Police had run their course, it was him.
After all, he was the one who wrote all the tunes for the band, and there had already been tension boiling over ever since the beginning. He and Stewart Copeland looked at music in two completely different ways, and while they could have easily carried on making a thousand more versions of ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘King of Pain’, Sting knew that there were some avenues he wanted to go down that didn’t suit the rest of his band.
But there’s no reason to think that Sting would take a dip in quality by any metric. He had been the one presenting all the songs ever since he began working with the group, and even Copeland had to admit that a classic like ‘Message in a Bottle’ was already a hit in the demo form before it even made its way into the studio. When Sting eventually struck out on his own, things were a lot more jazzy than most people expected.
For anyone expecting a pop marvel akin to Synchronicity, Dream of the Blue Turtles was a much different beast. The more aggressive stuff from The Police days was over, and in its place were some of the finest musicians Sting had ever worked with. Even though songs like ‘Russians’ were still hits on the charts, it was clear that the frontman was looking to completely revamp his sound rather than get stuck in a holding pattern.
There were callbacks to some Police songs like ‘If You Love Somebody Set Them Free’, but a track like ‘Fortress Around Your Heart’ would have been unthinkable in his old band. The amount of chord changes was already going to be weird, but with a bigger group of musicians to fill out the sound, it felt like he was chopping his old sound into pieces and rebuilding it from the ground up.
And given how well the album did on the charts, Sting finally felt he had room to breathe after leaving his old band, saying, “In my mind it was the start of my solo career, though it was a projected as a sort of hiatus. And luckily that experiment was very successful, which gave me the confidence to carry on and not run back to the Police. In my mind, I’d already left the Police and never intended to go back.”
While he eventually managed to go back for a reunion in the 2000s, it wasn’t like he was exactly run dry of inspiration, either. Dream of the Blue Turtles had triggered something, and despite its absolutely insane album title, there’s a throughline between this album and the kind of fun he was having once the 1990s rolled around on albums like Ten Summoner’s Tales.
Any chance of the band getting back together over the years had to have been lucrative, but Sting wasn’t one to look at the dollar signs when making artistic decisions. If he was going to commit to something, he needed to make sure that he could have fun playing his music, and Dream of the Blue Turtles is the sound of him breaking free from his bandmates and finding out what else was going on in the music world.
