What type of Sting do you like best? Is it the faux-punk and bookish former English teacher from the 1970s; the faux-reggae and bookish former English teacher of the early ’80s; the orange-haired apocalyptic Dune-starring global pop star of the Synchronicity era; the more jazzy solo career; the more explicitly pop solo career; the acoustic Sting meant to be taken seriously as an artist; or the “I’m just gonna play with Shaggy” old man that can still have fun Sting?
If you’re more into the folky, meditative, and surprisingly blunt/curmudgeonly old man Sting that made The Last Ship, then chances are you will probably want to hear the former Police frontman’s new song, ‘The Bridge’.
By all accounts, The Bridge was set to be another big bad pop record from Sting, as evidenced by the album’s first two singles, ‘Rushing Water’ and ‘If It’s Love’. Those two songs, despite concerning possible drowning and incurable sickness, were light, bouncy, and relatively optimistic tunes. The title track, which Sting premiered at his recent concert in The Acropolis in Athens, Greece, is far more introspective and ever so slightly dourer.
There’s really no way to live up lines like “We are but bags of blood and bone/Yet we carry the weight of our sons and our daughter.” Despite its somewhat gloomy atmosphere, ‘The Bridge’ features some delicate and beautiful fingerpicking from Sting and is a lovely melody to communicate some more nuanced ideas about the modern-day world.
“I wasn’t going to write about the pandemic at all,” Sting told BBC Radio 2 last month. “But as I said, it put me in a certain frame of mind. All of the stories, all of the characters in these stories, are between worlds. Between one thing and the other. One state of mind and another. They’re between pandemics, political eras, socially, psychologically. And all of us are kind of stuck in the middle of something and we need a bridge.”
Check out the debut live performance of ‘The Bridge’ down below. The Bridge LP come out on November 19.
