‘The Soul Cages’: the expansive album Sting didn’t expect to be successful
Sting says things as it is – as if this wasn’t already more than evident in his name itself, full of killer venom and acerbic tongue.
But beneath the striking veneer and a war of words, there is a man with a quivering heart. He may put up all the pretences of being a rock god, but there is something deeply human about the muses he draws on in his music, and there’s none more personal but equally universal you can get than the experience of grief.
In a musician’s typical way, however, they can’t just process their heartbreak through quiet reflection or hiding away for a little while. They have to channel it into something artistic, sprawling, and effervescent, which is exactly what Sting did on his 1991 solo album The Soul Cages. Lamenting on his late father’s passing only four years earlier, the record was a real labour of love – but, perhaps oddly, not one that the singer expected to reap him any huge successes.
Of course, this didn’t turn out exactly as he expected. A second number one album in the UK, a Grammy Award, and songs which many believe represent the pinnacle of the Sting songbook were all spawned from The Soul Cages, based on both its deeply personal perspective and the manner in which it related to the low points of life experienced by everyone in the world.
But this wasn’t something that was truly appreciated by Sting himself in the moment, as he took on a much narrower view of the project as a whole. “‘The Soul Cages’ had a fairly limited constituency – the recently bereaved,” he wryly deadpanned in a 1993 interview. Lacking in the defining blockbuster-like feel of previous chart-topping records, “I didn’t expect it to be ‘Thriller’,” he added.
But despite this rare glimpse of self-deprecation, there also came a dose of the truth. “This album is more expansive and that’s been the strategy all along, widen and contract,” Sting explained. “Because if you just keep widening all the time, you vanish as an artist. But if you keep focusing on the one person in the world who’s gonna understand your work, you’re left with yourself.”
Yet in itself, this ballet of the musical journey is one that the musician precisely epitomised in his analogy of his own self. Constant leaps, twirls, and elaborate flourishes can only take an artist so far – and as Sting proved, sometimes it’s in the moments where you fall down, literally and figuratively, that cultivate the most potency. As harsh as it sounds, pain is art. Life can never be truly represented by being on the up all the time.
Sting may not have felt like The Soul Cages was him at his most musically polished or acclaimed, but in a converse sense, by taking the more private approach, he opened himself up to something far more relatable that anything he could have mustered by trying to create in a purely aesthetic capacity. It’s in the moments where rock stars come back down to Earth – ignoring all the proclivities of fame, fortune, and rapture – and instead focus on the universal pains of subjects like grief, that we see their truest self. The irony is, as in Sting’s case, they can become all the more beloved for it.
