Sting: My Songs Tour: 2021 - 2023

Sting delivers a rousing show on My Songs tour with fan favorites: 'I am a very lucky man'...

Never mind when Sting talks about tantric sex.

Sting’s stamina as a performer and musician should be celebrated mightily.

At the scenic Filene Center at Wolf Trap Sept. 1, Sting played the first of two sold-out shows to kickstart the new North American leg of his My Songs tour, an outing that has circled the globe since 2019 – excepting a 2020 pandemic sidelining – and detoured as a Las Vegas residency.

Without pausing for a breath or break, the 71-year-old craftsman of some of the most sophisticated pop-rock in modern music barreled through an opening quintet of chestnuts that seesawed between Police mainstays (“Message in a Bottle,” “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”) and his storied solo career (“Englishman in New York,” “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You”).

These are not three-minute radio hits. They’re songs packed with challenging lyrics, complicated rhythms and serpentine codas. Intermingled elements of jazz, pop, rock and reggae. Poetic expressions of soul searching, quixotic love and yearning.

And yet, there was Sting, his voice as muscular as his biceps, headset firmly locked to allow him to roam the stage, bass neck titled upward as he leaned into his nimble finger work, rolling through his repertoire with ease.

In a field of graying rock icons, Sting is a platinum-topped torch bearer.

With a resume spanning nearly more than 45 years of material, Sting’s musical cup overfloweth with options.

But the point of the tour is to spotlight hits – still an impossible task given his dozen Top 40 smashes as a solo artist and another nine with the Police – while also paying remembrance to a few meaningful album tracks.

The precise musicianship of his excellent band, including longtime musical partner Dominic Miller on guitar, Zach Jones on drums and Kevon Webster on keyboards, provided “Fields of Gold” with a silky warmth (the stage, naturally, bathed in a burnt-orange hue) and pushed the soaring melody of the erudite “All This Time.”

Sting teased ace harmonica player Shane Sager that he couldn’t match the proficiency of Stevie Wonder’s original playing on “Brand New Day,” but the twentysomething Sager met the challenge with his soulful squawking throughout the song’s lackadaisical sway.

The well-paced, 19-song set list is bookended with some of Sting’s most recognizable singalongs, including Police favorites “Walking on the Moon” (no one “eeh-yoh-oh”s like Sting) and “So Lonely,” which dovetailed into its spiritual mate, Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry,” a showcase for Sting’s fluid bass work.

One of the most dynamic aspects of Sting’s music is its broad-minded sensibilities. Not many pop-rock stars could fashion a hit out of a pairing with an Algerian singer, as Sting did in 2000 with Cheb Mami. Their worldwide hit, “Desert Rose,” still stimulated with its collection of chanting, atypical cadence and Sting’s suggestively jutting right hip.

Likewise, the pair of pre-encore tracks from the Police’s final album, the landmark “Synchronicity” from 1983, reminded of that band’s inimitable magic.

“King of Pain,” its lyrics stacked with elegantly bleak imagery, its bridge both puzzling and profound, proved emotionally searing (Sting’s son, Joe Sumner, who opened the show, returned to trade verses with his dad).

And of course, the song most associated with Sting and the Police, “Every Breath You Take,” elicited the expected roar from the crowd as they sang along to this speedier live version over Sting’s haunting bass line.

While the radio favorites are certainly worth commemorating, the chosen album tracks and smaller hits that Sting has curated for the show also warrant attention. Background singer Melissa Musique slayed during a joyful spotlight moment on “Heavy Cloud No Rain,” while fellow backup vocalist Gene Noble infused “Shape of My Heart,” its chiffon melody as gorgeous as ever, with meaningful soul.

Given the length of the My Songs outing, it’s no surprise Sting and his band present a taut, 100-minute production.

They’ll continue to unfurl this sleek outing through Oct. 15 – including Sting’s One Fine Day festival in Philadelphia Sept. 9 that will reunite him with unlikely musical buddy,

© USA Today by Melissa Ruggieri

Sting @ Wolf Trap...

The niche role-playing game Burning Wheel characterizes persuasion as the art of convincing someone else that what you want is to their benefit.

And that’s exactly what Sting did when he came out for his encore at Wolf Trap recently and asked the audience what they wanted to hear, and they cried out for The Police’s first big hit, “Roxanne.”

If you look at the setlists from Sting’s current tour, you’ll see that his encores have all started with “Roxanne.” Sting, a canny and masterful performer, got his audience there by playing all his other hits in the main set, making “Roxanne” the logical choice for fans to request. It’s both true that fans really wanted to hear the song and that Sting worked them into requesting it.

That kind of command of an audience comes from roughly 50 years of playing music. Sting has been making music since before he took on the mononym Sting, when he was just Gordon Sumner, a working-class British musician. He began as a jazz bassist; it was with The Police that he blossomed into a singer and songwriter. He also became a genuine cultural figure who expanded beyond music into acting; he memorably played the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the 1984 version of Dune directed by David Lynch and recently appeared as himself in Only Murders In The Building.

But he’s primarily a songwriter, and what a songwriter he is. Just about everything Sting performed at Wolf Trap on Sept. 1 was a hit, and the songs were so familiar I didn’t have to search on my phone to determine what they were. The set covered the entire span of his career, kicking off with a song from his Police days, “Message In A Bottle.” Several other songs from his days with that band made it into the show:  the love song “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic;” the lamenting “King of Pain,” for which he was joined on vocals by his son, Joe Sumner; “Every Breath You Take,” which closed the main set; and the aforementioned “Roxanne” in the encore.

The content of some of these songs makes them unusual for big pop hits. “Every Breath You Take” is about a stalker and the object of of his obsession. Somehow, the sound of the song has obscured, for many, how fundamentally creepy and disturbing this song is. The BBC refused to play “Roxanne,” which is about a man in love with a prostitute.

After his tenure with the Police, Sting went on to a celebrated solo career that saw him to continue to mix rock with reggae as well as jazz and pop. For me, the pinnacle of his solo work is his 1993 album, Ten Summoner’s Tales, the title of which puns on his last name. “Fields of Gold,” Sting explained, is about his home in the English countryside, which is surrounded by barley fields and is majestic at certain times of year. Ballads figure prominently on this album, which also included the standouts “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You,” “Shape of My Heart,” and “Heavy Cloud No Rain.”

Sting’s hits continued to roll in with his last album of the 20th century, Brand New Day, which included the title cut and “Desert Rose.” I remember clearly when these songs came out and were on the radio. Sting noted that Stevie Wonder played harmonica on the former, and challenged his harmonica player to fill those very big shoes. Other songs in the set included “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” “Why Should I Cry,” “Mad About You,” and “So Lonely.” He closed his encore with “Fragile.”

When artists go solo after a tenure with a band, they often gravitate to playing guitar, especially rhythm guitar.  Sting is a bit unusual in that, even as he embarked on a solo career, he stuck with the bass. While he’s not a virtuous on the instrument - no one would mistake him for the late Jaco Pastorius - he’s more than competent as a player.

While the melodies and playing are great, Sting’s excellence come down - as it does with most - to the quality of his songs. Both with the Police and as a solo artist, he’s crafted numerous instantly recognizable classics. And at Wolf Trap Friday night (the first of two nights at the venue), he didn’t shy away from giving the audience exactly what they wanted: the hits.

(c) Park Life DC by Mark Engleson