How Sting Learned to Rock Again

His most electric LP since ‘Synchronicity’ addresses climate change, immigration and Prince.

- Patrick Doyle

IT’S A PERFECT SATURDAY MORNING, but Sting, unshaven and scruffy, is lying on a couch in a darkened New York studio, taking a nap before starting work for the day. He’s still recovering from playing New York’s Jones Beach Theater last night, the third date of his co headlining summer tour with Peter Gabriel. “That was a workout,” he says. “I’ve been up since 5:30. I’m the son of a milkman.” Sting is working overtime to finish 57th & 9th (named after the intersection he crosses to get to the studio every day), which has him returning to the guitar-driven rock music he hasn’t made in decades. “It’s not a lute album,” he says with a smile, a reference to 2006’s Songs From the Labyrinth. “It’s rockier than anything I’ve done in a while. This record is a sort of omnibus of everything that I do, but the flagship seems to be this energetic thing. I’m very happy to put up the mast and see how it goes.”

Ship analogies may be on his mind because he spent the past several years writing, and ultimately acting in, The Last Ship, a 2014 musical based on his childhood in postwar England. The project followed a productive, freewheeling decade of work that included an LP of Christmas carols, the orchestral