The one pop singer Sting considered the “consummate musician”
Sting didn’t want to settle for being just another bass player when The Police started.
He had tried his hand at working with the best bands that he could, and when he started writing songs, he was always looking for something that would perk someone’s ears up and give them something that they hadn’t heard before. And while it might not have been necessarily cool to know the ins and outs of one’s instrument, Sting felt that some of his heroes were the ones who had been great all-around musicians for years before they even started having hits.
Then again, it’s not like he couldn’t appreciate the technicians, either. Every single bassist that grew up around the same time Sting did was bound to be gawking at everything Jaco Pastorius was doing, but Sting wanted something a little bit more out of his playing. He wanted to write the kind of songs that made people’s hearts dance, and that doesn’t happen from someone practising their skills. He needed a little more commercial material in his arsenal, and Billy Joel was the perfect example of what he was working towards.
Which is strange, considering how much people were calling ‘The Piano Man’ too soft for traditional rock and roll. Everyone is going to be a critic when it comes to some of the greatest artists of all time, but even if Joel was never exactly the coolest presence on the charts, the fact that he could make some of the most unique pop songs of his time wasn’t lost on Sting when he started looking at his track record.
Because, really, there aren’t many artists in the modern age that can sound like Billy Joel. The New York legend had been testing out what songs were supposed to sound like since before he was even putting out his own material, and when you look at any number of his songs, it’s hard to think of them as being any more perfect than they are. You may hate ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, but there’s no way that the song is going to be any better than it already is with that rapid-fire delivery.
And given his classical background, it’s not like Joel shied away from the strange chords, either. He was known for throwing in the kind of chords that would have made anyone else turn their head, and even if it looked like The Beatles had shown what was possible in rock and roll, it was going to be a little trickier for anyone to sit behind the piano and try to work out all of the complex pieces of a song like ‘Vienna’.
So when Sting had the opportunity to pay tribute to Joel, he had no problem calling him one of the benchmarks for what pop music could be, saying, “I’ve known Billy a long time since I first came to the states in the 1970s. He knew all of our songs. We met up and I sat with him at the piano and he played everything from The Beatles to Gilbert and Sullivan. It just went on and on. He’s a consummate musician, consummate entertainer, and a great songwriter. He’s got a lot of different hats.”
And when you listen to a lot of Sting’s solo material, you can hear him trying out different hats in the same way that Joel did. His material is far more adult-oriented compared to The Police’s best work, but there are many times where he seems to find that odd chord to perk everyone’s ears up the same way that Joel did when he started working on songs like ‘Nothing Bout Me’ in the 1990s.
Joel still might not be considered the coolest rock and roll star in the world, but coolness never mattered to Sting. What mattered was being able to play the best music that you could, and no amount of critical lambasting was going to stop him from championing one of the finest melodists he ever heard.
