The album Sting wanted Bruce Springsteen to finish: “I don’t know what to do”
Gordon Mathew Thomas Sumner grew up near Wallsend’s shipyards, dreaming of a more glamorous life. Chancing upon an old Spanish guitar led him towards a musical path, where he morphed into the masterful musician we know as Sting.
For six years, he churned out some of the most genre-defining songs of the new wave while fronting The Police, alongside drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers. The band was a less-than-harmonious place to be, and after a 1983 performance in New York, Sting decided to quit the group.
It would be only two years on from the group when Sting would emerge from the shadows of The Police to release his debut solo LP, The Dream of the Blue Turtles. A record deeply entrenched in Sting’s determination not to be stuck to one genre, it is one of the Englishman’s best efforts.
The album would be a starting block that would allow Sting to accelerate into new heights. Later in the decade, however, he would experience a major personal low amid career highs, as he lost his father only one year after losing his mother. It stifled him creatively, and he was left unable to write for years until finally being able to exorcise his demons in song.
When it came time to begin writing his third album, his grief restricted all of his creativity. In conversation with Bass Player magazine, he reflected on this tumultuous time in his life: “I’d written a lot of little fragments of music, but there were no real ideas coming out,” he remembers. “I was genuinely frightened. At one point, I thought, ‘This is it, I’ve just dried up!’”
His studio sessions became less creatively thrilling and more introspective and therapeutic. “Perhaps I was afraid of what might come out if I wrote something,” he admitted. “I think there was an awful lot of denial and blockage going on in my subconscious – there were things I wasn’t ready to face.”
On his previous works, one of Sting’s primary motivations was to shapeshift as a writer and performer, as he did when he was a child, gifted with an old Spanish guitar. He’d had an early knack for seeking inspiration in different genres, sounds and compositional styles; travelling through music, he could become anyone he wanted.
Now, with the daunting task of writing about his anguish, he looked to someone he knew could understand his burden: Bruce Springsteen. Two months before the sessions for his next album were supposed to begin, still with nothing written, he sought Springsteen’s advice. “He was just starting his own album, and I said, ‘Bruce, I don’t know what to do. Have you got any bad songs you don’t want?” Sting recalls. “He offered me a couple. Then one day I just sat at the piano and started to free associate, mumbling to myself. There was nobody in the house – and the mumbling got louder, and gradually I started to sing lines. Words started to flow out. ‘Island of Souls’ was one of the first.”
The sombre, melodic ‘Island of Souls’ would become the opening track of Sting’s third album, 1991’s The Soul Cages. The concept record is rooted in the loss of his late father, and also looks back on his childhood. “I wrote down what I thought were just disconnected images and lines,” Sting says. “Quite a few were about the sea, and all were linked somehow to my father and his death. Suddenly, I realised I was mourning my father, and then the whole thing poured out of me like a river.”
Springsteen’s songwriting prowess would revitalise the singer. As Sting described it, The Soul Cages became “an album for the recently bereaved, a small market, but always there”. The album speaks to the catharsis that music can have in purging emotions, and how a collection of songs can remain resonant with people across all walks of life.
