arts & entertainment
Music
Sting’s new album finds
inspiration in folk music
Winter
magic in song
TONY MOLINA
By Will Fifield
“I’VE ALWAYS LOVED this poem by Robert
Louis Stevenson called ‘Christmas at Sea,’ and
I was wondering how I could possibly work it
into the album,” says Sting during a recent
phone interview with The Costco Connection.
The former bassist and vocalist for rock trio
The Police was explaining how, during the
recording of his new album, If on a Winter’s
Night, the 10th studio release of his solo
career, he was stumped as to how to set this
poem, which fits the theme of the new recording perfectly, to music.
Stumped? He’s Sting, who has sold more
than 100 million albums during the course of
his career, earned scads of awards and, as a
member of The Police, been inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
He has also been an outspoken activist
who, in 1989, with his wife, Trudie Styler,
formed The Rainforest Foundation ( www.
rainforestfoundation.org), an organization that
strives to support indigenous people of the
world’s rain forests. He’s appeared in 15 movies and earned all kinds of humanitarian
awards and honorary titles.
Yet, for all his experience and musical
prowess, he was stumped, and he was clearly
excited to tell this story as we spoke at length
while he walked from a rehearsal to his hotel
in Durham, England. In fact, he was excited
about the entire album and the strong connection between many of its 15 songs—most
of which are based on folk music of the British
t
The Costco Connection
You’ll find If on a Winter’s Night, Sting’s new
recording of winter songs, at selected Costco
warehouses now.
Isles—and the north of England, where he
grew up as Gordon Matthew Sumner, oldest
of four, with a father who was a milkman and
a mother who was a hairdresser.
“We started [this project] in the end of
January, in my home in Tuscany, which is
warm in the summer but in the winter is very,
very cold. We all huddled around the kitchen
fireplace, eight or nine musicians, all wrapped
up in coats and big boots, and we explored
these songs together. We figured out what
would work and what wouldn’t work. But I
“The songs [on this album]
are ... all connected by the
theme of winter in what
I call magical elements.”
—Sting
think the tone of the album generally has a
kind of traditional tone. The songs [on this
album] are secular songs, sacred songs, folk
songs, some of my songs, classical songs, all
connected by the theme of winter in what I
call magical elements,” Sting explains.
“I didn’t have the pressure of having to
write all the material,” he says. “The material
was preexisting. And I was allowed to bring
my own songs into the canon. In many ways
the pressure was off in that sense, but it was
interesting to put my own songs alongside
much older work and realize that a kind of
lineage or DNA [exists]. I recognize the DNA
between a modern song like, for example,
Not many people know about Gordon
Sumner, 59, a former schoolteacher from
Newcastle, unless you call him Sting, the
name he adopted before joining rock trio
The Police in 1977. If on a Winter’s Night
is the latest release of his solo career.
NOVEMBER 2009 ;e Costco Connection 49
“The Hounds of Winter” [Sting’s original
composition, track 10 on the new album] and
a seasonal traditional song.”
Because he’d worked with all the musicians before, some for more than 20 years,
many of the songs didn’t have the mystery, the
hidden part to discover, that “Christmas at
Sea” presented. “I couldn’t quite work it out,”
he says of his quest to put “Christmas at Sea”
to music, “until I heard Mary [Macmaster]
play this Gaelic song. While I couldn’t understand the lyrics, I figured what it was telling
me about was all about the gravitational pull
that home has at Christmas. I think all music
speaks a narrative, if it’s well constructed. I
thought I’d juxtapose that song with a musical
rendition of the Stevenson poem. It’s my
favorite track.” C
