The song Sting said was made for “lunatics”
Most of us know what it’s like to come across a scary drunk deep in the dead of night, but few of us know how to ward them off, unlike Sting, who knows precisely the right course of action.
Sting’s view on annoying drunks isn’t too dissimilar to how some people feel about spirituality and astrology. For some, it’s similar to why people become attached to religion, which is to find belonging and self-identification. There’s nothing wrong with that, obviously, but what irks the musician the most is when it’s so incessantly there that it won’t leave you alone.
Nobody likes a preacher, especially one who has made hate their entire personality. JK Rowling is probably well on her way to being more associated with her hate speech than any of those god-forsaken books, and it’s all because she doesn’t really talk about anything else. Loads of people follow the same pattern. People might talk about Pink Floyd more fondly if Roger Waters hadn’t become a sour, shake-fist-at-everything kind of person, but these are also the more extreme cases.
When Sting wrote ‘Sister Moon’, he’d become inspired by a late-night encounter with an intoxicated person who wouldn’t leave him alone. Worse, he wouldn’t stop spewing mindless garble, the kind the singer already detests: matters of the moon. That night, the drunk stranger kept asking him the same question over and over: “How beautiful is the moon?”
In a moment of quick thinking, Sting thought up a Shakespeare quote to scare off his intimidating opponent, because, as he once put it, nothing works better than out-weirding an annoying person. So, he answered with, “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”, which the person liked so much that he turned away satisfied and left.
To Sting’s credit, it’s a pretty good response, especially if the situation beckons an answer so fierce in its finality that the other person has no choice but to shut up and move on. But that wasn’t the only thing that fuelled ‘Sister’s Moon’, as he took it as an opportunity to poke at people who become obsessed with such concepts, too. As he later said, the song is “for the lunatics everywhere, for all those whose sanity is dependent on the phases of the moon”.
His comment becomes somewhat self-deprecatory when you look closer at the lyrics, where instead of letting his gripe feed through, he comes across as someone who does the exact thing he’s apparently criticising, singing, “Sister Moon, will be my guide / In your blue, blue shadows, I would hide / All good people, asleep tonight / I’m all by myself, in your silver light”.
He squeezed in his prized one-liner later, with “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun / My hunger for her explains everything I’ve done”. More than that, the song’s arrangements feel like a gentle stroll late at night, when the only accompaniment is the moon and some tender evening lamentation. It might be a song for “lunatics”, but it certainly feels compelling enough to conclude that Sting doesn’t entirely hate the concept after all.
