It’s not that Sting has been doing nothing since his last album of new songs.
“It was probably eight years where I didn’t feel the urge to write a song,” he said when I asked him about it at a session at the TV Critics Association winter press tour.
“Whether I’d lost my passion, I don’t know. I just didn’t feel I had anything useful to say,” he said. “And my motto has always been if you have nothing to say, be quiet.”
Now he has something — a full blown Broadway musical based on his memories of growing up in a small shipbuilding town in northeast England. Songs from “The Last Ship,” which will begin in previews in Chicago in June, looking for a fall opening on Broadway, were collected for a new album and presented in a series of live shows at New York’s Public Theater in September. It was filmed for a special, “Sting: The Last Ship” that debuts on “Great Performances” Feb. 21.
In addition to nearly all the tracks from “The Last Ship,” from a rootsy band that includes Jimmy Nail and Jo Lawry, he included the waltz “The Night the Pugilist Learned How to Dance” from “When We Dance,” and closed with the single from “Soul Cages,” “All This Time.”
It shouldn’t be surprising why. “It’s not the first time I’ve tackled this subject,” he said. “It’s a very important subject to me. And in 1990 I put an album out called ‘The Soul Cages,’ which was about this. The first song was called ‘Island of Souls.’ So that opens the play, and it’s very much a prologue to what follows it. I think there may be two or three songs that people would already recognize from my previous work of the same subject.”
Sting says he’ll include a couple of the songs from “The Last Ship” on his upcoming tour with Paul Simon, which will otherwise likely be oldies before his eight-year songwriting gap.
But he stressed that during that time, “I wasn’t idle. I was touring extensively. I was also recording songs by other composers, usually dead. I recorded an album of songs by John Dowland, who was a 16th century lutenist. I recorded bits of Schubert, bits of Handel. You name it, I tried it. Folk songs, preexisting traditional folk songs. And I think that fed it fed my muse really.
“So,” he says, ” I was fallow rather than idle.”