At Home With Sting: The Playlist

Sting is the first one to admit that he never saw his new album coming. Had it not been for the pandemic, he never would’ve been forced to leave San Francisco, where he was mounting The Last Ship, a musical based on his 1991 album The Soul Cages—and he never would’ve found himself at home in England working on the music that would become The Bridge, his first album of new material in five years. “The cycle of my work is, I write, I record, I tour, so I just decided I would move the cycle along a little bit,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Being in lockdown and making a record, it’s sort of a cloistered existence anyway. I just started work at 10 in the morning, worked through dinner, had no idea what I wanted to write about, but knew that if I didn’t work, I’d go completely nuts. I ended up with an album materialising over the months by accident. It’s always an accident. I never have an agenda or idea of what’s going to come out.” For Sting, songwriting is as much about taking initiative as it is about having patience—for inspiration to strike, but also for giving it the time and space to do so. “If you go to the river, and you throw a line in the river, you may not catch anything on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday—but maybe by Thursday, if you’re patient, something will come out of the water,” he said. “Songwriting is like that: If you don’t go to the river with a line, you won’t catch a fish.” Sting shared a personal playlist with Apple Music that features songs that were fish worth waiting for. Many of them, like Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”, are favourites he’s loved for decades. “I remember buying this record on the Stax label at 16,” he says, noting that the single arrived weeks after Redding’s tragic passing at the age of 26 in 1967. “The song is incredibly sad—not just the story, but there’s something in it that’s just very ruminative. I was born near the river; I used to go down to the ferry landing and watch the ships go by. That feeling of watching ships go by, as the line says, it’s something that really resonated with me.”