Sting doesn’t really do downtime. Pandemic shuts down a city, he just flies back to England, shrugs, and starts clocking in like he’s punching a timecard at the shipyard again. “Ten o’clock the next morning I clocked into work,” he told me, “and I worked through dinner.” Recording, for him, is like fishing—most days you throw the line in and get nothing. Then, maybe on a Thursday, you catch something worth cooking. One year later, he had a new album, The Bridge, and a pile of characters who, as he puts it, are all “in transition… from one world to another, from one state to another.”
That’s Sting-speak for restless souls. He’s always loved characters with jobs and quirks—gamblers who are philosophers, cowboys with day jobs, outlaws moonlighting as ghosts. “Nobody is just one thing,” he said. “You’re more than a DJ. I’m more than a songwriter. I putter around in the garden.” He swears the characters just come to him, though his method isn’t what you’d expect. He writes backwards: finds a refrain first, then reverse-engineers why anyone would say it. “That’s my secret,” he said with a grin, like a magician who’s just explained how to saw a woman in half but still makes you believe in the trick.
Naturally, his people rarely start in good shape. “They’re the most interesting characters,” he said. Songwriting, for him, is therapy: “You start off in a situation that’s difficult and complex, and you can’t see the way out—until the bridge comes along.” The pun isn’t lost on him.
Take Captain Bateman, one of the album’s recurring figures. He’s an outlaw traced back to 11th-century ballads, a soldier imprisoned for life who seduces the jailer’s daughter to escape. In Sting’s version, “He’s punished.” Of course he is. “In the old ballads he gets away with it, but in my song he doesn’t,” Sting said, half-smiling at his own cruelty. Leave it to Sting to take a happy ending and sink it.
Elsewhere, the imagery keeps returning to water. “For me, water traditionally symbolizes the unconscious. It symbolizes the feminine. It fascinates me.” His single “Rushing Water” arrived as a kind of classic pop-rock Sting track, though he insists it “wrote itself.” And then there’s “Loving You,” with its electronic textures wrapped in warmth. He deliberately pushed his vocal high in the mix. “I wanted my voice to be right inside your head,” he said. “It’s a very personal record because of that.” Remote recording didn’t dull the intimacy, either—though his drummer was in LA and guitarist in Italy, he treated it like conjuring a state of mind.
“Hills on the Border” takes him back to his own geography—the war-stained landscape between England and Scotland where he grew up. “I wanted to write a ghost story about my home area,” he said. You can practically hear the fog roll in.
For the deluxe edition, Sting tossed in two covers he swore he’d never do: Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and Harry Nilsson’s “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City.” He calls Dock a masterpiece, one he wouldn’t have touched if not for being asked by the Alzheimer’s Association. “People with dementia more readily remember songs than anything else,” he said. Recording it forced him to analyze why it works. “Remarkably, there are no minor chords. It’s all majors. That’s very clever. How do you do that?”
The Nilsson track came as a soundtrack request for a pandemic film about exhausted health workers in New York. “It just worked,” Sting said simply.
When he’s not writing therapy disguised as songs, Sting’s apparently moonlighting as a murder suspect. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building roped him in as a caricature of himself, a neighbor under suspicion by Steve Martin and Martin Short. “They didn’t tell me it was a comedy,” Sting laughed. “I played it straight.” Which makes perfect sense—if you’re Sting, the joke’s always on everyone else.
Asked about “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” becoming a pandemic anthem, he seemed genuinely pleased. “I like songs that are useful,” he said. Songs that can shapeshift into new contexts. The man who once wore winged leather underwear in Dune is now okay with being a six-foot-distance PSA.
Speaking of Dune, no, he hadn’t seen the new movie when we talked, though he was hoping they’d bring him back in the sequel. “Old Feyd,” he said with a grin. The self-mockery suits him.
But at the end of the day, it’s still the songs. He’s folding some of The Bridge into his Las Vegas residency, staging his catalog as a visual autobiography—Roxanne stripped back to the Paris hotel room where it was written, “Message in a Bottle” blown up arena-size. “It’s really the story of my life,” he said.
Which is maybe the whole point: every Sting song is a character sketch, but every character’s also a piece of him. And like Captain Bateman, gamblers, or ghosts on the border, the man himself is still looking for that bridge to someplace safer, stranger, maybe even funnier.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
