The one album Sting called his critical lowpoint: “It was attacked”
The greatest musicians in the world usually have peaks and valleys throughout their careers. Anyone would want to write their musical history as being spotless from back to front, but what they might like to record isn’t always what the fans are looking for, and it’s usually easy to tell which albums leave listeners cold as they stop showing up when the artist hits the road. But Sting never stayed in one place for too long, and every record had to be something new for him to be interested.
The last thing the bassist was interested in was copying the formula, and the minute he left The Police, he was already testing out where he could go. No one exactly saw an album like Dream of the Blue Turtles coming, but by working with some of the greatest players in jazz, Sting allowed his music to morph into jams that he could change on the fly whenever he played them live.
Some of the albums were better received than others, but the 1990s was always going to be tricky. While Sting didn’t fit into the same mould as someone like Phil Collins, his contemporary take on music was going to be seen as super passe by the time Nirvana kicked in, and it showed the minute that he put out The Soul Cages album right before Seattle took over the world.
Out of all the records he released up to that point, Sting felt no one really understood what The Soul Cages was going for, saying, “All my albums sell about five or six million copies, so The Soul Cages wasn’t exactly a flop. But it was attacked most in England for being pretentious. The buzzword was gloomy, I think, or depressing. Maybe I’m defensive about it, but it’s very heartfelt, very earnest. I couldn’t get away from these ideas about my background, my father, death.”
Considering what Sting fans had been looking for from him the past few years, it’s hard to think why they would have been so unhappy here. A lot of what he talks about is admittedly not the cheeriest subjects in the world, but if something is this heartfelt, no one could blame him for lacking enthusiasm. If anything, it’s almost a bit more progressive in places than most people give it credit for.
The Police may have been born out of punk, but there were always progressive tendencies in their tunes, and hearing Sting work on this is far more engaging than if he did a blatant retread of a song like ‘Englishman in New York’. You will have to muscle through a fair amount of early 1990s production to enjoy it, but it’s still got some of the most gripping tunes of his career, like ‘All This Time’ and ‘The Wild Wild Sea’.
If you only want to look at it lyrically, this album should have been a home run in the age of grunge. The whole point of the movement was about bringing some authenticity back into rock and roll, and where Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder cried out in pain and anger, Sting was basically doing the more seasoned version of that by confronting the death of his father headon, even if it’s drowned out in a few too many keyboards.
Ten Summoner’s Tales may have made the older stripe of fans happy, but while The Soul Cages isn’t the kind of headspace anyone would want to return to, it’s admirable to see Sting create such beauty out of tragedy. Not everyone needs to talk about death and despair to resonate with audiences, but the only way any audience will connect with them is if they can feel their emotion through the music.
