The 2000 project Sting wanted nothing to do with: “There’s something faulty with this”
Being just another pop singer never appealed that much to Sting during his solo career.
He wanted to make the greatest music that he could, and while he liked the idea of still having the occasional hit on the charts, chasing after that kind of success didn’t always appeal to him after releasing several classics. He already had that part of his career, and there was a lot more exciting music for him to make when he had the right people around him on every one of his projects.
But after Ten Summoner’s Tales, Sting was already looking to go beyond rock and roll altogether. A lot of the biggest names in music had been a lot more glossy in the late 1990s, and even if Sting could make a half-decent tune, he was still in the mode of adult contemporary for most of that decade. That wasn’t a bad thing by any stretch, but even some of his biggest songwriting colleagues were finding new ways to reinvent themselves.
Paul Simon had already begun working with world musicians a long time before Sting got the same idea, but Phil Collins was the one pointing the way forward. Sting’s brand of melodic soft rock wasn’t going to work next to the likes of Nirvana by any stretch, but when Tarzan came out, he at least had a target to aim at. Collins had a whole new generation singing along to his tunes thanks to the Disney giant, and if Sting could make similar tunes, who’s to say that he couldn’t get in on that action as well?
Well, he probably could have started with a less volatile movie than what he signed up for. In his initial talks with Disney, The Emperor’s New Groove seemed promising, talking about a ruling emperor who gets humbled by becoming a llama after suggesting wiping out an entire village for a water park. The idea of a ruler seeing how the other half lives could have been a far more adult concept for the Disney corporation to take on, but the more the film got into production, the more Sting felt uncomfortable with the premise.
The idea of turning the whole thing into a buddy roadtrip movie with John Goodman and David Spade was a better idea in practice, but since Sting’s songs were about the initial concept, he wrote a letter to Disney wanting nothing to do with the film anymore, saying, “I’ve been aware for a while now that my vision of the world and Disney’s may be at odds. I can only be candid, but there’s something intrinsically faulty with this film, and I find it very difficult to work on something that goes against my beliefs.”
But the fact that Sting still provided two songs for the film was a decent compromise, if only for how funny it ended up being. Emperor Kuzco’s theme song, being written by Sting and sung by Tom Jones, is still one of the more random things that either artist has ever taken part in, and for a song meant to soundtrack a massive ego like Kuzco’s character, it does at least suit the film reasonably well.
At the same time, the song ‘My Funny Friend and Me’ might be one of the most out-of-place songs to ever appear in a Disney movie. The whole tune was already written with the initial concept in mind, and since the whole tone of the film got revamped, the idea of a mellow ballad closing out everything as the credits roll pulls you out of the film so hard in the same way that one might feel if they were listening to a glossy ballad on a punk album.
The tonal shift may not have worked all that well, but the fact that Sting didn’t completely divorce himself from the film did work out in the end. The Emperor’s New Groove is still one of the cult classics from the Disney renaissance, and even if it’s not nearly the same kind of massive home run that Beauty and the Beast or Tarzan was, the fact that it still pulls in viewers means that people are going to be hearing Sting’s tunes for generations to come.
