Sting and his band perform songs from his new album, The Last Ship, at The Public Theatre, New York. The songs, inspired by the shipbuilding community of Wallsend where Sting was born and raised, will form part of his forthcoming Broadway play. He and the band are joined onstage by the actor and singer Jimmy Nail. Of course Jo Lawry is singing along! :-)
The songs (rf. lyrics)
- The Last Ship (folksy) 0:00
- Shipyard (rousing) 4:56
- Coming Home's Not Easy (wondering) 14:53
- And Yet (jazzy) 16:22
- August Winds (reminiscent) 20:21
- What Have We Got? (stirring) 23:15
- Practical Arrangements (conversational) 28:09
- What Say You Meg? (earnest) 34:04
- Dead Man's Boots (practical) 39:13
- Big Steamers (choral) 43:18
- Sky Hooks and Tartan Paint (jaunty) 46:35
- Jock the Singing Welder (rocking) 51:11
- So to Speak (mournful) 55:50
- Show Some Respect (rallying) 1:00:27
- Underground River (rf. Language of Birds) (balladic) 1:05:31
- The Last Ship (Reprise) (ennobling) 1:10:53
I don't think anything you do can get away from who you are. Why would it, and why would you want it to? I'm proud of my story. I think it's a good story. It's not finished yet. But I'm proud of who I am, I'm proud of where I come from. That's a simple, abiding emotion in the end is gratitude. I'm grateful.
What an
enthalling performance, a masterful piece of work, an ennobling story. In the modern world of social media and mobile devices, I am thankful most for what we have at our disposal. I woke up in the middle of night, and decided to listen to this new music and new story from Sting & Co.
Sometime around 2004, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known as Sting, a rock star with 16 Grammys and more than 100 million records sold, found himself with a severe case of writer's block. It wasn't that he stopped touring (he didn't), making money (he still made plenty) or even recording (there were albums of other people's songs and a new symphonic treatment of his past material), but he found, to his chagrin, he could not write any new songs.
This went on for some eight years. He was, in the words of writer John Logan, "at an impasse." The title of Sting's intensely personal, strikingly reflective 2003 autobiography, "Broken Music," had proven prophetic.
"I just found myself thinking, 'What's the point?'" a scrunched-up Sting says, softly, matter-of-factly, occupying as little space as possible at the back of a 42nd Street rehearsal studio here one recent afternoon. "I just didn't have the desire or the passion. I was treading water as a writer."
Reference:
Sting on 'The Last Ship' in Chicago — and the cargo he's been carrying.
It was between 1988 and 2008 that I didn't, and couldn't, write any poetry. While I weathered this long dry spell without any qualms whatsoever, Sting must've felt an enormous sense of pressure. He is a recording star, after all, and an artist at that who feels that compulsion to create. My friends and I saw him in concert in Dubai, in early 2010, and it was a thrill. We reveled in all of his familiar music, but I noticed there wasn't any new stuff. In fact, I hadn't heard of any new stuff from him in ages. I thought I was just out of touch, and had simply lost track of Sting, in a heavily-traveled decade of my life. But he was in the midst of that disconcerting and protracted writer's block.
Every word, in the lengthy (reference) article by Chicago Tribune writer Chris Jones, is worth reading.
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