Did his trips to South America have something to do with an attempt to gain as much distance as possible from The Police? At least his second solo album, 1987’s Nothing Like The Sun, sounded like Sting could have said goodbye to his bandmates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. The squad of experts who now supported him was simply too large. Gil Evans took part, Clapton, Manu Katché, Annie Lennox, Mark “MTV” Knopfler and Branford Marsalis. This album sounded like jazz, operetta, was tropical and metropolitan in equal measure.
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The three central songs (and singles) of “…Nothing Like The Sun” represent different experiences of the then 36-year-old Sting. He wrote “Fragile” and “They Dance Alone” after his visits to Nicaragua and Chile respectively; in “Fragile” he mourns the death of an American aid worker. The song, more or less whispered on acoustic guitars, was his appeal for peace and is still his most popular solo song to this day. “They Dance Alone,” like some of these other pieces also released in Spanish, delves even deeper into politics. It is dedicated to the widows of those men murdered by the Pinochet regime. Bono, who toured Latin America with Sting as part of Amnesty, released a U2 piece with the same theme: “Mothers Of The Disappeared” that same year.
Still, Sting took a much gentler approach than some. In contrast to his colleagues Peter Gabriel or the pioneer Paul Simon, he didn’t try to sound like a “world musician” back then, or at least to get “world musicians” who would turn his songs into something completely new. Sting was aware of his inner limitations when it came to composition, at least in the ’80s. It was Sting jazz.
Most striking was the single “Englishman in New York,” a mash-up of thoughts. The Shakespearean Brit Sting sings, looking at the American city with a mixture of fascination and disgust (“I don’t drink coffee, I drink tea, my dear / I like my toast brown on one side”), and he demonstrates his dandyism a little too grandfatherly with his leg spread and an umbrella. To underline his “alienation”, the pop is replaced by a kind of hip-hop beat in the middle of the song. That doesn’t make the song any better, but at least you can’t blame Sting for being late to discover urban sounds in 1987.
A bit hidden in position eleven is one of the highlights, “Little Wing”. If you’re covering Hendrix, you shouldn’t focus too much on the guitar. Together with Gil Evans and his orchestra, Sting balances between big band, calypso and rock. The most beautiful part is the part where a guitar transitions into the saxophone.
“Be Still My Beating Heart” is no less impressive. Anyone who wants to hate Sting could feel confirmed here. In this sultry blues pop, he tries to soothe his feelings of love by devoting himself to academic reading: “I’ve been to every single book I know, To soothe the thoughts that plague me so”. The best song on the album, however, is the opening track, “The Lazarus Heart”, composed for the deceased mother. It tells of the resurrection in the most openly joyful tones, driven by Branford Marsalis’ saxophone, which sounds like a rushing stream.
Things were completely different for Sting when his father died after the album was released. The death of both parents caused writer’s block. It would take four years until the next studio album, “The Soul Cages”. It would be a work with a similar class, but without the sometimes playful, optimistic tones of “…Nothing Like The Sun”.