The one genre Sting called the best in 400 years: “A legacy”
Everything Sting ever made was meant to think outside the box.
There was no point in him making the same music that he heard in The Police if he had a finer musical palette, and he wanted to sample a little bit of everything whenever he worked on one of his records. There was so much more music out there than simply being a rock and roll musician, but he felt that all roads pointed back to the musicians who started it all for the popular song years before the musical charts even existed.
The biggest names in music may have all gone back to people like Elvis Presley and The Beatles as the ones that truly started everything for pop music, but Sting didn’t need to keep relying on those rock and roll heroes. He would always wish to be as good as Paul McCartney, but when you look at the way that he was constructing his music later on in his career, he was trying to make music that went down in history with the true legends of the jazz world as well, especially with people like Omar Hakim on drums.
Then again, jazz wasn’t just the genre that everyone went to when they wanted something more than traditional rock. Sting had been a studied musician years before he had even joined The Police, and a lot of that meant learning every single piece of music he could get his hands on. He wasn’t going to be writing lavish operas or anything once he started working on his solo work or anything, but if his songs could work as folk songs before anything else was added to it, he knew he had something great on his hands.
After all, all of the greatest rock musicians had to rely on only a handful of instruments to get their point across in their early days. Even Bob Dylan was trying his hand at doing renditions of traditional songs before making his original classics, but it wasn’t so much about the subject matter that struck a nerve with Sting. It was about the simplicity that came with making one melody resonate with so many people.
And when you listen to how Sting used all those lessons on records like Songs From the Labyrinth, it’s easier to get an idea of what he was talking about. Some of the biggest songs that he was working on were centuries old at this point, but Sting wasn’t looking to bring back the Renaissance era. All he needed to do was show everyone how something so simple could manage to feel so authentic in the right environment.
Because long after rock and roll was a thing of the past, Sting felt that folk music would still be one of the best genres in the world, saying, “I think all English music of the last 400 years is built on the same bedrock, which is folk music. [John] Dowland obviously was steeped in folk music, as was Vaughan-Williams, as was Benjamin Britten, as were The Beatles, and in fact as am I.”
“When you scratch away the surface of what we do in a contemporary way, you find those elements. I don’t think it’s a great stretch from modern songwriting to Dowland, it’s part of a legacy.”
Sting
But what mattered in Sting’s case was what he did with his renditions of the tunes. He could have easily tried to interpolate the melodies of those traditional tunes into his own work just like he did with his own material every now and again, but the fact that he stayed true to the arrangements was a much better call. If he was going to make an album all about how essential these songs were, why not play them in their purest form?
Not everything about Sting’s career was centred around keeping things simple every time he made a record, but when you stripped away all of the other musicians and even his original recordings, he was still just a great musician. It wasn’t what everyone expected by any stretch, but the entire point of a professional musician is always about keeping people guessing at every turn.
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