‘A Thousand Years’: the song Sting apologised for performing
The idea of being one of the biggest pop stars in the world was never something that mattered to Sting.
He was more than happy to make the best music that he could, and if the general public happened to come along for the ride, that was well worth it from his point of view. But when the world started changing around him, he could sense when certain songs didn’t fit the moment like they should have.
But the power behind a lot of Sting’s songs is that they are timeless in their own way. As much as the studio version of ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ is firmly timestamped in the early 1980s, it’s easy to hear the tune in any place and time and still get the same musical euphoria you had when you first heard it. As soon as Sting set out on his own, though, his writing had already begun to drastically change.
He wasn’t interested in making standard pop songs. Dream of the Blue Turtles was one of the most inventive solo records ever made at that point, and while it took him a while to find his footing as a pop artist, his status as an adult contemporary artist is more than secure thanks to ‘Fields of Gold’ and ‘Fragile’. And yet, when he seemed to carve out a place in his life to bring people joy, he managed to find the one gig where he could give nothing to the audience.
Because as much as music is used to unite people, the tragedy of 9/11 was always going to cast a dark shadow over anything else happening that day. Even if you weren’t in the US at the time, the news coverage of planes flying into buildings was bound to be sickening for anyone with half a heart, and while Sting was playing a gig in Tuscany, he was shellshocked at the idea of performing at the time.
If you go into Sting’s mind real quick, music was a celebratory practice in many ways, and playing the wrong songs would have felt completely out of place. On the other hand, Sting was convinced that he wasn’t going to stop playing because some terrorists struck fear into the hearts of millions of New Yorkers, and while he did manage to get things going for the live album All This Time, there were a few tunes that ended up being a bit too on-the-nose for him in retrospect.
When looking at the setlist, Sting admitted to fumbling it by including the tune ‘A Thousand Years’, saying, “The songs kept surprising me with how appropriate they were, or how close they were to the situation we were in. In the second song I sang, ‘A Thousand Years’, there’s an image of ‘towers of souls’ rising into space. That was a little too close, and I apologised to the audience that this was happening. But each of the songs recalibrated itself in the moment.”
Sure, the imagery of towers falling might have been the definition of the phrase “too soon”, but that was hardly a reason for him to cancel the whole gig. Music has the power to bring people together to celebrate, but it also gives everyone the power to heal, and without having any connection to the attacks, All This Time felt like an entire show of a band and audience reacting to the growing weight of the world in real time.
The album itself doesn’t have a ton of energy behind it, but it doesn’t really need to for anyone to understand why things were dire. The world had changed within the span of a few hours the day this record was made, and even if Sting wished to take back a few of those performances, it was best to leave everything in as a raw document of what had happened that day.
