The one artist Sting said validated his songs: “Biblical sweep of the landscape”
When Sting first started out playing music, he didn’t need to have permission to make the songs that he wanted.
He had a firm understanding of what the people wanted to hear, and although he didn’t have the same taste as his fellow members of The Police after a while, it didn’t take him long to land on his feet whenever he came out with the tunes that people wanted to hear, like ‘Fields of Gold’. But even if he was quickly turning into one of the darlings of easy listening pop music, all it took was one person to show him that he was on the right track as one of the greatest songwriters of his time.
But if you look at Sting’s early career, nothing seemed to show that he was going to be a songwriter for the ages or anything. The punk wave seemed to take over the minute that The Police became famous, but even if ‘Roxanne’ didn’t have that stabbing guitar part from Andy Summers, everyone could agree that Sting’s delivery was different. No one was singing like that or taking those leaps, but it was all part of making the next step in his musical journey.
Sting tended to gravitate towards music that was a bit more strange than what is commonly found on the pop charts, and even if he didn’t have the means of doing that in The Police, he wanted to open up a new world when his solo career began. No one could have imagined anyone making something as strange as ‘Russians’ or ‘Fortress Around Your Heart’, but that came from his affinity for jazz harmony. He had dissected a lot of those Weather Report records, and he wanted to go down in history like them.
Then again, being one of the greatest jazz artists doesn’t make for the best hits of all time. Norah Jones is still highly respected in her field, but it’s a much different audience that caters to her music compared to everyone who was out buying the latest Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera record when she first debuted. But even if Sting fit snuggly into that kind of club, hearing his song being stretched to its limits by Johnny Cash was a gift from the musical heavens.
Anyone writing specifically for ‘The Man in Black’ needed to know what to expect, but ‘I Hung My Head’ almost sounded like Sting wrote it with a country twang. The song’s story about a kid who ends up living a life of shame after accidentally shooting a traveller when practising his aim is the kind of heartbreaking story that Cash knew all too well, and with that voice, Sting felt that he never needed to complain about not getting respect.
Because if it was good enough for that kind of American icon, it was more than enough for him, saying, “I’m from the north of England, I’m not from El Paso or somewhere romantic like that. But nonetheless, I like the storytelling aspect of country music. I like the sort of biblical sweep of the landscape. So when somebody like Johnny Cash covers one of my songs, I feel vindicated somewhat.” And that’s only scratching the surface of what Sting could do with other artists throughout rock history.
Aside from legends like Paul McCartney wishing they wrote some of his tunes, Sting has always surrounded himself with the kind of people who could actually appreciate what he brought to the table. Frank Zappa had seen the pure musicality of what he was doing while he was still alive, and while Paul Simon didn’t seem like the best fit at first, Sting was more than happy to lend his skills to the same kind of worldly music that he was capable of when they toured together.
So while Cash’s music is like looking at a piece of musical history, Sting wasn’t looking to make songs that could live on like museum pieces. He wanted to keep challenging himself, and if Cash could go outside of his comfort zone to cover him, it wasn’t that far a stretch for Sting to start dipping his toes into genres like country music or reggae or jazz whenever the opportunity presented itself.
