The artist Sting called the father of modern songwriting: “The guy who we follow”
The art of songwriting isn’t some new phenomenon by any stretch. As long as humans have been able to speak, it was easy for anyone to pick up an instrument of their choice and start banging away on it until they had something roughly resembling a melody. Not everything during those early times was meant to be tied to recording contracts and press tours or anything, but as far as Sting was concerned, all that mattered was someone with a song in their heart that they were willing to give to the world.
Then again, Sting always had a slightly more sophisticated approach than a bunch of his peers. He may have grown up in the same era that birthed bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols, but he wasn’t afraid of releasing a song like ‘Roxanne’, even if it meant having jazz chords thrown into the mix that left most punk bands confused. But listening to his work with The Police and in his solo years, the best tunes are the ones that don’t need much adornment to sound amazing.
Without discounting Andy Summers’s hypnotic guitar riff on ‘Every Breath You Take’ or Stewart Copeland’s fantastic drum work on ‘King of Pain’, those songs would have been classics had Sting only played them on acoustic guitar. And even when slipping into easy listening music half the time in his solo years, hearing him make a song as gorgeous as ‘Fields of Gold’ out of only a few chords was a feat of genius.
But the melodies that tug on people’s heartstrings like that don’t have their roots in rock and roll. After all, Sting had been working with the classical arranger Michael Kamen, and despite his involvement in albums by Pink Floyd and Metallica, working with Sting was an excuse for the bassist to start looking at music that resonated centuries before he had even picked up a guitar.
Although Sting eventually made a cross into folk music on his later albums, he always felt that the roots of all great rock and roll music came from listening to composers like John Dowland, saying, “I look upon Dowland as the father of the whole thing. He was a lute player who travelled the whole of Europe playing really popular songs. Every home had a lute, and every home had a Dowland songbook. He was the guy whose legacy we follow. Whether you are James Taylor or the Sex Pistols, it’s what we do.”
It might seem insane to think of Dowland’s work in the same breath as bands like the Ramones, but each of them were about the concept of spreading the gospel of music across the world. No matter what genre it fell under, Dowland’s work was instrumental in helping bring people together, and even if it wasn’t exactly the most trendy music to be listening to today, the ones taking their craft seriously knew to keep those same values in mind.
Whereas Dowland may have been the tip of the iceberg, metal musicians didn’t necessarily forget about the appeal of classical music, either. Even though Yngwie Malmsteen is considered a guitar legend and one of the coolest guitarists on the planet, it’s fair to say that he’s listened to his fair share of Paganini over the years to be blessed with those kinds of musical chops.
But even then, it wasn’t about the massive feat of strength that it took to get someone’s point across. Sting knew to leave something a bit more sophisticated in the mix whenever he played, but whether it’s listening to his flirtations with jazz or something from the Elizabethan era, the mark of any good art is to have something that sounds good after years in the public consciousness.
