HERE BE LIFE

Sting's new album is an answer for troubled times

A few months ago my husband and I were talking about how there’s not any good new music anymore. In addition to belying our age and crotchetiness, this conversation also spoke to the increasing sense of mortality one has as one “gets closer to the end of the conveyer belt,” as my husband’s inimitable Uncle John often says.

We all need more no-nonsense takes on life and death from people we trust as we age, and to get a super sturdy, captivating take, in the form of an entire album from an immensely skilled artist, is almost unheard of these days.

Of course, there’s a lot out there worth listening to— there are specialists in Really Wailing, Super Moody, Eclectic as Hell, Societal Healing through Self-Aware World Rhythms Synthesis, and I Recorded This in My Bedroom On My iPhone and You Can Barely Tell Because Technology, to name a few moods/modes I see repeated often.

But for the last ten years or so it seems that we’ve lost the generalists, the folks who tie together a million muscly threads, wrought from experience, strength, restraint, and wisdom as much as talent and savvy, into a nice juicy roast that seems to say HERE BE LIFE.

Those are the kinds of albums that compel over and over, in their entirety, that work on us like novels, inviting us into a world that’s not ours, and magically also ours— but bigger. They bring the awe and mystery of our stupid little lives flooding back in, and throw a bunch of gorgeous, hand-plaited lifelines into the aching ocean.

“Whatever happened to Sting?” I asked my husband. “Oh God, he’s been mooing for decades. Christ, it’s embarrassing,” he said. It’s true: on his recent-ish album “If on a Winter’s Night,” which I actually enjoy for many other reasons, Sting composes most of the vowels in egregious slow-mo, like a lowing cow, so that it sounds like he’s got gobs of taffy in his mouth and just can’t seem to swallow them. (We enjoy making fun of Sting, maybe because he’s too cool for school, or maybe because we respect him and it makes us feel closer to the process of his artistry).

Sting’s latest album, though, “The Bridge,” released a few days ago, is astonishing. I’ve lost count of the ways in which extreme variety makes for palpable depth of experience on this album, but I find I must name a few:

1. He’s drawn signature sounds and moves from every decade since the 60s together, adapting them brilliantly— from the wide-eyed recreation of the 60s in his “Sitting by the Dock of the Bay” to the funky guitar saturation of the 70s, the splash and synth of the 80s, the earnestly gothic romance of the 90s, the world music vibe and sentimental introspection of the aughts, to what he’s currently helping to define, himself, in this moment. Such a giant accretion of sounds and textures has no business working well. Yet it does. Where the variety should create chaos, it is instead dense, masterfully sculpted, and transformative.

2. He’s got so many parts of the person, the life fully lived here— one gets the sense that he is a person who has been brought low, who has managed to take notes even while suffering, who cares about human history, who is given to romanticism and mythologizing on the one hand and an almost steely pragmatism on the other, who aspires to higher purposes and planes despite the evidence he doesn’t hide from but collects like berries in winter. One gets the sense that the person who drove the creation of this album has heart, intellect, talent, intuition, and spirit to spare. My reaction at the completion of the album, listening all the way through from start to finish (I haven’t been moved to do that with an album in ages) was one of gratitude.

3. I’m a word person, so I get a kick out of the variety of registers and genres he draws his word choices from. He derives material from Scots, maritime/nautical, dopey, biblical, lyric, oracular, mortal, scientific, confessional, romantic, chivalric, tragic, and myriad other lexicons. I was never bored with the lyrics, and fairly frequently intrigued or floored, even by moments which at first glance felt tired or cliche. Even those, on closer inspection, revealed an exciting degree of self-awareness and functional subtlety. And where they didn’t— where transparent or especially straightforward language won the day, it had a kind of committed muscularity. Hats off, Gordon.

4. Rhythm: the man’s never been afraid of a good 5-beat measure. There’s a fresh masterpiece of the 5/8 persuasion on this album that thinks into the experience of growing up on the wrong side of town with its beat as well as its lyrics and melody. There’s also a languorous waltz, a lot of back-beat hiccupy effervescence, an almost samba-style lament about love, and a Zydeco-esque shuffling chorus to a narrative poem song. The rhythmic skill is plainly evident, the playfulness perhaps less obvious, but just as valuable.

5. Having everything from Celtic instruments to nylon-stringed guitars to 80s videogame sounds, dogs barking, a clocktower ringing out, a somewhat virtuostic but recessed fiddle sound, and a densely textured drum track on almost every song ends up being, miraculously, lush, rather than muddy. There’s even room for an entire track devoted to an agile bass improvisation, doubled neatly by Sting’s voice in a manner akin to a pianist lost in the moment of the cadenza, or John Coltrane grunting along to his sacred “A Love Supreme”— but in 80s The Police-style: sexy, unhurried, accurate.

The title track, “The Bridge,” is a seasoned fist that gathers the many songs of the album together into a humble but hearty harvest— a spare, fully bared sense of purpose:

[…] We are but bags of blood and bone

Yet we carry the weight of our sons and our daughters

Now the fields are all but drowned

And we climb up to the ridge

Some will seek higher ground

Some of us the bridge

[…] Open the gates that we may follow

Open the bridge to all of us

Open the floodgates to the river

Open the bridge

That we may cross

One gets the feeling in this track, and from the album as a whole, that part of the work of living well is also the work of dying well; that we have a responsibility to the generations after us to find our way to the crossing bravely and smartly, with a full sense of all we have been, could have been, are now, and may yet be. We must recount and recall, invent and invigorate, borrow and beg, grieve and hope as required by a relentlessly various experience, and as we’re able, in our constantly changing states and capabilities.

Thus fully equipped, Sting seems to say, we can see our increasing nearness to the unknown as sacred and celebratory, a privilege rather than a curse.

Holy moly. I’ll take it.