Sting Sings About Dying in The Last Ship

Credit: Michael Taggart Photography

Dying like a rock star often means tragedy. Whether from overdose, sickness or suicide, lurid, high profile deaths sweep across the media like natural disasters. Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury and Kurt Cobain, to name a few, mark the long line of young men, gone in their prime, who reiterate the dangerous world of rock ‘n roll. But for Sting, dying is not much different than it is for everyone else.

The former frontman for The Police has enjoyed a long, successful solo career, a stable, enduring marriage, children and even grandchildren. Now at 62 years old, he’s turned to thinking about and composing music on subjects less prominent in his youth-obsessed genre of music—grief and dying. As the artist said in a recent interview with Daily Mail, “I have lived more of my life than is to come: That is an interesting place for an artist – more interesting than writing about your first girlfriend.”

Credit: Wikipedia

Throughout the interview, Sting opens up about his father’s death, which inspired his latest album The Last Ship, and about how his own sense of mortality has influenced his music. A musical that premiered last June in Chicago, The Last Ship tells the story of a man who returns to his small shipbuilding hometown—a place that mirrors the artist’s own humble upbringing. For Sting, the story is an exploration of his father’s life and a profound statement of his grief. “In our sixties, how do we face this imponderable idea that we are not going to exist anymore? We make art. We tell stories. We have to face it, to tell it.”

It’s refreshing to see a cultural icon, such as Sting, open up so candidly about such a difficult subject. What’s more, opening his music to death and dying gives us yet another cultural artifact through which we can explore our own grief and experience with dying. Although only the good die young, not all of them do, and Sting is here to show us how rock stars can guide our zest for life even as we approach the end.

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