The Sting Interview

hey everybody i'm rick biatto i have two special guests here sting good day dominic miller he's been playing with sting for 30 about 30 years right yeah very well 31 years it's an honor to meet both of you i've been a massive fan as many of you know because i've made many videos about sting including one called why sting is uncopyable and uh i want to actually start off by talking to you about this thing the reasons that you're uncopyable and there are musical reasons why i know that you have a background in jazz i want to talk about kind of musically how your knowledge of music influenced the things that you write for example i use uh a song i burn for you as an example of a melody that uses the aeolian motor uses the flat six which you really lean into on the symphonic record it's an e minor so you hit that's that note c a lot in the middle and it's so beautiful those surprises i call them haunting tones or upper extensions can you talk about that about the use of these notes well i like the the way you use the word surprise because me the essence of all music is surprise when i listen to a piece of music if i'm not surprised within the first eight bars i've stopped listening i've switched off i need surprise dominic and i both have a teacher called j.s bach and you play eight eight you know eight measures of bark and you're surprised every time every day every time and then the next eight bars and the next day birth so composition is really about surprise um it's not about theory for me it's just an instinct that um i have the song you mentioned is also in three four times yeah i love three it's very old-fashioned you can only do a waltz to it uh it's not military but there's something about a waltz that i'm a sucker for a six eight time uh which i adore and you know i i just have fun with that stuff i'm not here to belong to a genre or adapt myself to any kind of rules i just do what i instinctively feel i want to do and i'm lucky to have that opportunity and that privilege to do that i'm also helped by some fantastic musicians who feel the same way exploring the whole spectrum of music and not just saying we're in this ghetto here you know but they're not they play everything jazz classical pop soul so the impetus for these ideas though when you're when you're starting to write a song historically you would start with the instrumental demo tell me about the process of how you actually craft a melody and a song a lyric you'll start with a little germ of an idea a little a cadence your fingers might find something so that's interesting let's take it a little further without that spark of interest without that little building block isn't the way to go you know so you have a guitar riff or something but a guitar if it's not a song right the guitar if needs to be structured and once i have a structure of a song maybe a traditional structure this chorus first chorus bridge key change coder that's the ideal for me even though it's not terribly fashionable at the moment the structure tells me a story you know some people listen to music and they see color i see characters i see situations i somehow i hear lines that people say or refrain but it's the music that's telling me the story but it needs structure a riff on its own won't do that so what will you typically do first if you're writing a song like fortress around your heart that's a song that i talked about in my video about why you're uncomfortable now that song is very odd actually oh boy it's incredibly melodic yet it changes keys three times just in the verse you start in g minor to to a flat major and then you get on f sharp minor which is very weird yet it sounds completely normal to the ear and then you go into the chorus which is in g e minor d over f sharp g then c a minor c d how would you even come up with an idea like that that song is so unique it starts with with this three chords and then i just go on an adventure with it you know just find it it writes itself you know and if you just have to be open to it just have to be in a state of grace where the the music will tell you where it goes next how do you know i'm supposed to go there i just do you know i'm not a trained musician i'm not a conservatory musician i just have this trust that that harmony will lead me in the right direction you're not a trained musician but you played gigs as a jazz musician i held a job down you know reading charts yeah in a big band and then in the theater i could still do that if i had to i need to brush yourself somewhat so you're somewhat of a trained musician yeah i just didn't get to go to a conservatory right i i envy people who did at the same time you it forces you to exercise a different kind of muscle you know i know some amazing musicians who can play just about anything but don't write right so there's something this is a different part of the brain which which is used so i'm happy where i am are there any of your big songs that went unfinished for a long period of time no i'll finish i'll finish them or i decide not to finish them uh lyrics are difficult dominic would say would you get that lyric from i said i just walk in the garden and it's under a rock and we wrote a song together how many years 30 years ago um with my heart tom came in with this fantastic riff beautiful cadence sort of bark like descending baseline and um i said okay so we spent the morning you know make structuring it make it into a song here's a verse here and a verse there and there's a key change there so i'll just go for a walk and i have it in my headphones and i just walk around a few hours later i've got at least the concept of what the song is telling me which is about a gambler and tom said where'd you get this from i don't know it just occurs to me but the music tells me the story dom when you played that riff that thing has been sampled by so many people and used for songs what do you think about that well it's a huge compliment i think but i mean the the truth behind that one is that that riff is that i just actually came up with that motif as an exercise for myself just as a warm-up exercise based on um sixth sixth chords yep and it's like that takes inspiration from uh kind of from shophan type chords piano chords i was just messing around with that kind of like the way john mclaughlin would would write uh chord sequences he wasn't really articulating the third so much it's much more about the sixth is what like tells you what it is and so i was just having fun with that and what i think about it is when i hear rappers and an artist using that riff i'm kind of smiling at myself first of all thinking that unbeknownst to them they're actually playing classical music from europe and and because i don't i can't really claim it as my own really because that's that was the source and i just reorganized that idea and then it was sting's uh imagination as a songwriter to this is a perfect example of collaboration is to is to uh he was the one who said well that is a song and i'm going it's just an exercise mate and um cut to he walks in the garden and comes back with a lyric and that song was written in a day it was just done it didn't take three months and sometimes songs are like that you know so i'm very flattered and uh but i don't really claim total ownership with it because i know whether where it came from and it came from classical music sting i've said this many times on my youtube channel that if the police came out today if a song like roxanne came out and no one had ever heard the police that people would say what is that that is amazing good and and you said an interesting thing i listened to your audible uh book that you uh did recently and you talked about there was a small window of time when as a punk band you kind of snuck in the door with the police but i disagree with that i think that any time you would have been successful because of your voice your the way that you write songs the uniqueness of it would have always risen above roxanne in its form that it was out in 2021 and people would say what is that that is amazing what do you think about that um you know i opened the current show with a version of it that i wrote in paris in 1978 just on a guitar was a kind of a bossa nova the same melody but the same chords but uh without that quirky thing that you know stuart and i worked out together where the bass was on the second beat but the song still resonates today as if it was a modern song a lot of our songs still do they're not rooted in time they're sort of unmoored that's right and that's what i like i like i love that they don't sound like they belong to 1978. it belongs to to now when i was in 10th grade that's it was 1978 and the first time i heard that on the radio you could hear your voice above the noise of the car even with the radio down low because the the register that you sang in and i immediately turned it up and said what is that wow and then i'd ask my friends have you heard that song roxanne it's like yeah who is that band is it they're called the police i think register is interesting you know most heavy metal singers sing up so i'm a heavy metal singer but i have a little more melody and it's the same way that you know to get above the noise of the band you need you need that register you can't you can't be a baritone with a rock band really the same way a sergeant major and in the army would scream and yell on the on the paragraph you know why because they had to get over the sound of artillery in battle you know charge or retreat they needed to be heard singers have the same need i would argue that that voice then today on the radio or on spotify or on apple music would have the exact same effect you just don't hear singing like that and frankly the song forms maybe they might have to be altered slightly maybe the interlude after the first chorus is chopped out and you go right to the second verse you know i think of you know king of pain it's so uh an odd song right this is still not still is still is an odd song what's up with the with the long break in there how was the timing of that was that just were you guys looking at each other and they're just messing around just moving around yeah i i thought of it as a sort of operatic song really there's different chapters in it we didn't care i mean we just wanted to have fun well your music changed from the police to dream of the blue turtles your music was evolving it started evolving really on the ghost the machine album more keyboard you were using more keyboards keyboards i guess were being invented at the time really right you know so it's like start using more keyboards and then on synchronicity and then dream of blue turtles big departure stylistically new band but melodically even more sophisticated melodically the songs were evolving but they were still songs that were hit songs yeah you know i just wanted a larger palette and the three pieces is a wonderful vehicle but uh it's limited yeah drums bass and guitar and i i think we achieved an amazing amount of stuff in in the short time you were together very unique but i just wanted a broader palette because i was song driven and not necessarily band driven so i then started to form bands which which could play whatever i wanted to write so the first album that i did without the police was with brantford and kenny kirkland and um you know uh omar omar and uh daryl jones daryl jones fantastic group all from the jazz world and that was one thing but the palette was widened and then you know i formed a band with with dominic and vinnie and um david sanctious but they they a breadth of experience in playing any kind of genre so whatever i felt like writing they could help me do it the police was one thing the police needed to be the police just the police but i wanted to spread it spread it a little bit so dominic did you start in seoul cages or on tennessee right yeah i want to come back to one thing about the police i went to the rock and roll hall of fame induction ceremony a couple weeks ago in cleveland i was struck by the fact that i thought about the police when i saw the police on the on the wall there and i thought there was a band that went out at the top and how few bands go out at their peak is that satisfying has to be yeah do you think about that my instinct was that we'd achieved everything we could possibly have thought to achieve tenfold 100 fold after that you get diminishing returns of satisfaction so i needed to take another risk with my life and uh of course i had momentum because of the success of the police whatever i did next people would be at least curious and so i used that momentum to kind of boost me into another career but it was a risk but i think art art is always about taking a risk if you're not taking a risk you're not doing it without mentioning any artists do you ever look at artists and think to yourself oh they should have stopped years ago as far as at the height of their yes i do i think it's very hard to leave a band after a certain point because a band is like a teenage gang it's like a street gang you know you you don't want to be in a street gang for the rest of your life you can't mature you can't explore you have to be stuck with this regiment of three people say that's it so no we shouldn't mention anybody but there's there's no way out for them now and do you think that they know that too do you have friends that have no idea okay i know but of course you think that you you know sometimes i and i'm not saying i'm not saying that the people didn't mean to interrupt that the people at the rock and roll hall of fame that that i feel that way about any of them i'm just saying that i thought about when i was looking at your at the police on the wall there that that struck me but you know people are you know i i i admire ac dc for example i think what they do is fantastic you know the way they play together the sound is fantastic you always know what you're getting with an acd record it's the high quality but you know what you're going to get you know what you're going to get so yeah but that's not me if i were to say to you guys just think about the records that you've played on together what is a record that uh there's there's always records that come out you know where the production and the songwriting where you you listen back to you say boy we nailed it on that is there is there a song what do you mean something is probably the one that stands out for me because from top to bottom every song it's um it's like perfect um but for more emotional reasons probably the soul cages because i didn't know sting then he didn't really know me and in a way i had a lot more freedom as a musician to uh to just do my thing because he was trying to discover who this new guy was so i had total freedom on that record and it was my first you know entry into the sting world and uh so for that reason i i think soul cases but what's your opinion well we said diverse really we should talk about your audition do we have to talk yes we do i think it's very important for musicians to realize this so dom turns up in new york i'm i've heard he's got a good reputation in london so he turns up and down he's struggling with to get a sound out of his amp and he's checking valves and he's checking everything and this goes on for a long time it's kind of getting frustrating and then i just turned the volume up on this guitar and turned [Laughter] so at that point i thought okay just tell me to f off now and i'm fine with that right i got a trip to new york out of it and i'm gonna go out for a nice meal and um but then we jammed we jam on want to be jealous no sunshine and we did a bunch of different things uh all genres and nothing was a real problem because i'm a museo i've been listening to this all the stuff that you've been listening to rick you know like a weather report john mclaughlin you know like a lot of uh everything you know rock jeff peck you know yeah so nothing was a real problem but you know we just jammed and uh i think we read a couple of songs that there probably but i wasn't really nervous at that point because i thought i've already lost the gig so that was so i thought let's just do this but it just kept going on and on and on and after about three hours uh i was ready to go home you know i'm fine with it i got to hang this thing we jammed and it was cool and then he went i just want to have a word with you and he said what are you doing in the next few months and i went what do you mean you know well do you want to hang in this burner and i want you absolutely so cut to 30 years later there's manuka on drums yeah pretty good not too shabby but that album for me if you're asking about a record that means something to me deeply it's the soul cages you know and it's my least understood record in many in many ways but it has a constituency of the recently bereaved they will come up to you because i just lost my parent both my parents died in the same year so that's what i was subconsciously writing about and to this day people come saying oh my dad died that album really meant a lot to me and which is very nourishing for a songwriter to hear that your songs have a utility beyond just you know their own solace it actually helps other people so that album is a very special one for me it was dominic's you know introduction to into my world kenny kirkland was on that record and manukachi man it was they were great sessions they were very emotional and i remember on their albums that uh when one of the first song that we recorded with kenny kirkland he was in his own booth and uh and i'm like wow this is so cool you know we're headphones are on and we're doing a take and kenny's playing away and then he he tacits he's he stops playing i'm thinking that's how these guys do it you know that's like the school of miles davis and the people know when not to play and then we carry on with the song and still he's not coming back in i'm thinking okay well he's not coming back in and then we got to the end of the song he didn't he never came back in and then when i went to the control room i had to go via kenny's booth to get to the control room he was asleep on the couch so i thought laid back it was this is the world of sting you know this is how laid back these musicians are and that's how they lay out i think i i remember you doing an interview when uh ten sumner sales came out if i ever lose my faith was was the single and you said that you would never make a record unless you had a couple these flagship songs at least these singles like that and i thought that was a very aware thing to say can you talk about that a little bit well you know i if if you have to define what i am i'm a i'm a popular musician you know i like i like to sell records yes and that demands flagships you know songs that can get on the radio now it's getting more and more difficult yeah at our age because there's a great deal of ageism in our in our industry but at the time you you needed at least two songs that radio go oh yeah we'll play that and then then you could fill it in with with you know interesting interesting stuff but you needed the flagship and uh i think you still do i think we've got one on the new record which comes out on the 19th you know rushing water it sounds like a flagship to me so so how do you know that you have these songs sting is it just that from experience from having so many hit songs in the past that you know okay this is one or do you actually play them for people and kind of see people's reactions yeah i mean we're very collegiate you know we we tend to react from people's uh responses to songs the other musicians people around us engineer the wives you know girlfriends how they react uh but i also have an instinct very finely honed instinct for it some things you know will never get on the radio but you don't care you know they're they're good pieces of work anyway but they need to be boosted by the flagship when you finish a song okay let's say you're going to play it for dom are you nervous the first time you play something you have a demo of a song or well the whole songwriting enterprise is fraught with anxiety you know always will i ever write another song i'll ever write one as good as that one you know so you finish a song and in your that feeling of calm and satisfaction lasts about 20 minutes and then where's the next one and you're never sure you know my theory of creativity is is like fishing you go to the river you throw a line in and you don't catch anything next day the same next day same maybe by thursday you catch a fish but i know this unless you go to the river with a light you ain't going to catch a fish so turn up you turn up in the studio with your musicians be patient something will happen something will happen not immediately but it will happen do you get up in the morning and write oh i have a great idea for a song a lyric or something or is it or do you actually have to sit down and just mess around till you come up with something i mean that there's no one way to write a song and i try all methods you know i've started with a lyric first um but messing around it's a good it's a good it's really it's a good start you clock on at 11 o'clock and you start messing around and something play that again that works with that okay twist that round let's take the tempo up a little bit change the key you know you're playing with plasticine and it's incredibly elastic yeah you just have fun you see let me let me just sit with that for a while you go for a walk and say okay i know what to do now i put a verse in there and a key change here it's a jigsaw i like puzzles music for me is a fascinating three-dimensional puzzle but the arrangement is very important to you right because you always historically came up with parts back in the police everybody thinks oh well andy summers would come up with the drum part with the guitar parts and and stuart would come up with drum parts but you came up with these parts the chord voicings and things like that that was your yeah right i mean yeah that's amazing i would pre-arrange the songs yeah but you know ideas do fantastic musicians and they would always add something to to what what i'd created and i'm incredibly grateful for that but i wasn't just limited to the base though right but i think that that's a misconception with people that i always thought to myself well yes sting must have come up with those voicings himself yeah and uh i still do yes okay so dom when you're when sting plays you a demo of a song and he's got a guitar part on it tell me about your process as far as how you take something um if i ever lose my faith there must have been a demo of that song right actually i think i was around when he came up with that what usually fascinates me first before anything else is the way that sting comes up with a two or three chord sequence that i just go what is that as you said earlier though that his his dialect or his language and is uncopyable yeah and those are the times where you're absolutely right i'm thinking nobody else would have come up with those three chords a good example is let's say the hounds of winter is the chords and that's in that song if you have a listen it's like where did that come from so my process is just to is to like dig deep into it while he's already on to the next thing he's thinking about and i'll obsess i'll do a lot of the obsessing for him you know what i mean yeah and then i'll come back after i go for a walk in the garden and show some options around that idea you know what i mean yeah and that's that's my my role kind of thing is like to present options based on on on this incredible uh two or three chord sequence and that if i ever lose my faith is no different i heard the idea that he he just came up with and so i had a lot of fun just uh messing around with the all the options but it's still his id it's his baby you know it's a tennis game though you know yes i'll serve serve the ball back with a slightly different spin on it and then it goes back to him so it carries on it's a lovely interesting thing about that song so in the first time around in the bass you do that but then you don't do it the second time or third time and that is such a hook and it's just something that always will grab people's ears it's one of these things that people don't notice but they do notice it the subconscious hook that's in the face oh i did that deliberately yeah no it's that's a total it's about surprise yeah and you expect to hear it again you're not gonna hear it again forget it right and the fact that it doesn't happen the second time is like oh i gotta wait for it to come around again when's it gonna come around again and then the next verse comes and you hear and you're like oh yeah i love that so every time i hear that song that's one of those things that just immediately grabs my ear yeah right down to the how short you're playing the bass notes and that you with the groove it just it's very meticulous i know that you're very aware of all these things you know it's a very interesting um place to to lead a band from being the singer being the bass player yeah um you know the keyboard player or dominant could play a c chord unless i play a c it's not a c chord right so i control the harmony you do i'm also controlling the the top line because i'm singing it yeah so the band literally is operating within my bandwidth that's right a big stick there you know it's it's it's a subtle way of leading a band and uh it's a position i find very satisfying it's a wonderfully malleable unit that you can you can manage and everyone has to have a good time and everyone has to shine i adore my musicians shining that's makes my job easier i give you the ball you've got to run with it and so we're a good band okay so why did you go from playing with a pic to playing with your thumb uh sound sound with a police um i would double all the the bass parts on a fender strap and a pick so it just had that edgy sound and i'd always play with my fingers as well but for the police i started it was a punk time but yeah i've been playing jazz before that yeah would never use a pick right it was frowned upon but then now then i went back to playing with my thumb and then i use a technique called apoyando from yeah spanish it's hidden all my work is hidden under here you think i'm just using my thumb i'm not and i damn i damp a lot which makes the notes short and that you started to do probably in the 80s or so right you started playing you switched you're playing yeah but i noticed that but you've never really come back to pick yeah no i haven't played a pic for a while was it ever difficult to play songs that some of these really syncopated tunes with the police would you ever would you have to practice some until they became you just slow everything down when you know where the furniture is you know where the bodies are you can play anything if you slow it down so that i would do that and i you know with a new record i've sung it in the studio i played the bass at a different time but to do it together i need to practice i still practice i have to right there's no there's no other way right we practice damn you practice right yeah i do i practice bach actually very badly we both do and uh very slowly and uh that's that's my kind of thing and if i can do that and um i learned a very good lesson about practice from one of sting's musicians uh who still comes around occasionally jason robelo he says that if it sounds good when you're practicing you're doing it wrong and what he means by that is uh i thought yeah what do you mean by that it says that is to practice without dynamics is one of the most difficult things to do so every note has no personality it's just even and that's really difficult to do and that's why bach is the best music to do that with because the personality is already in the music so you don't have to do anything but just play evenly and you know yeah i practice occasionally but not enough so sting if you were able to meet one musician go back in time and hear one musician play that would be jerry spark for both of us i bet you know we we sit at his feet every day we play a bit of bark every day bit of the cello sweets a bit of the partitas you wouldn't want to hear what we do but we're learning the whole time absolutely and so we're already sitting at his feet he's it's all out there on the page do you think that music today is um from from what you hear i mean you must you must uh occasionally fire up spotify or yeah see what's out there tell me what your what your thoughts are without being you don't have to be specific what are your thoughts about modern songwriting about things like auto-tune some great musicians and great songwriters and great music out there what i have noticed though is structure is slightly simpler now it's minimalist the bridge has disappeared there isn't a bridge for me the bridge is therapy you know you set a situation out in a song uh my girlfriend left me i'm lonely chorus i'm lonely another you reiterate that again and then you get to the bridge there's a there's a different chord comes in and i think maybe maybe she's not the only girl in the on the block you know maybe i should look elsewhere and then that leads to a that viewpoint leads to a key change in the quota things aren't so bad so it's kind of therapy and that's therapy for me the structure is therapy in modern music uh most of it you you're in a circular you know trap really it just goes round and round and round and it's it goes fits nicely into the next song and the next song and the next one but you're not getting that release that sense that there is a way out of our crises and we are in crisis the world is in crisis we're in the you know political crisis we're in the pandemic crisis in the climate crisis music needs to show us a way out and modern music isn't doing that at the moment so there is no music for for today right there is no real music that describes what is going on in the world today i'm looking for solutions you know i'm not looking to just reiterate my problem i want to see how to get out of it so that can help if you took the bridge out of every breath you take to me that's one of the greatest bridges ever written the key change thank you it's just amazing it's completely unexpected it's one of the best parts of the song it is the best part it is the best part of the song okay i didn't want to say that i look forward to seeing that part every night because you know it's athletic for a start but it is that fantastic release tell me about the process for this new record and how long you've been working on it well more than any other record this is was a collaboration between dominic and myself uh i think dom came up with the the original you know kernel of an idea for at least three or four songs i mean that's that's interesting um he brought something from his album absinthe which i loved uh something in 5 4 called etude and i listened to it and i went there's eight bars at near the end of that can can we just take that out and said sure so we excised those eight bars and we looped it and uh he started to play and then i improvised a line against it i had no idea what the lyric would be and i love you know compound time it's it just makes me very excited and we ended up with a song called harmony harmony row but uh the the kernel of it was was dominic's piece we did a waltz we did our beautiful walls it's got to have a wall again for a while so if you bring the walls in i'm there and that was called the the bells of saint thomas so it's a lovely collaboration talk about making records in the 70s police days versus the records that you guys made later on as far as how much time you would spend yeah with the police you came out of the records in 78 79 80 81 and 83. and there was touring with all that yeah how long were the i i mean i know about the first record but how long would the other records take not not long at all a couple two weeks a few weeks you wouldn't have that many choices you would you know it was a take yeah find a good take and then you know mess around with it but now there's so many variables you know so work expands to how many variables you can you can accomplish at the time you had to make a choice but you had to be able to play too if you couldn't play let's talk about that for a minute being able to play when you recorded on tape i mean you guys started your careers a lot of your careers were done recording on tape people don't have to record on tape people can record one bar they can loop it they can do they can fix whatever yeah talk about the type of musicians that like how you had to actually be a decent musician to be in a recording studio or to make records back in the day well i mean you know to make a record you had you had to have a certain level of musicianship right you know people would do recording tests for singers how to go in into into a recording studio and make sure they could sing and tune because there was no other way they had to sing and tune so musicians had to know how to tune their instruments and you know know how to play uh i i prefer that we came up that way just as i prefer that we learned our craft as performing musicians in clubs in pubs and of course that that shop floor of that industry is gone now there aren't many rock clubs there aren't many pubs with music licenses the clubs have gone so the only way you can make it in the music business now is to go on x factor or america's got talent or something yeah which is wonderful but the the groundwork the back the backbone building of of a career it's impossible to have and i don't envy younger artists that i think you're missing something i always wanted to ask you about the idea of songs with a one-line hook messenger model has multiple single line hooks that are repeated over the beatles were masters of this i want to hold your hand i want to hold your hand i want to let it be to just repeat the same phrase four times and a lot of police hits and a lot of the hits on your solo career would have a repeated hook you know i'm glad you mentioned the beatles because the reason i'm a musician is because of the beatles they were from liverpool i was from newcastle both port towns in the north of england working class they both had the same education as me i went to a grammar school they were scholarship boys smart working class kids they conquered the world with their own songs and therefore gave permission to a younger generation a decade younger permission to try the same thing we'll try that i know those four chords i could i could do that probably and we all tried and uh some succeeded oh some succeeded by the by the skin of their teeth but uh we owe a lot to the beatles they they really were an amazing influence on all tell me some beatles songs that are both of you guys that you think are just incredibly perfect songs don't play yesterday don't do it i'll do it you'll like this this is dorm's own version [Music] i think that that's uh they should probably should have done that paul should have done that [Music] sing what is a great name like a beatles song that is you think there's hundreds of them uh black bird penny lane i like uh day in the life because that's a great example of two songwriters with two songs two songs it's really two songs but i love that uh whole that period of beatles as well you know mccartney was asked here last year uh what's what song do you wish you'd written and he picked one of mine and yeah that's for my reaction saying one i i wish i'd written like a hundred oh my god so uh yeah i i interviewed peter frampton and i said to him peter what's the best ballad ever written immediately what was that whiter shade of pale oh i love that song it's like very back on a g string totally it's like descending baseline i love the lyrics of that song because they're totally meaningless and that they sum up an entire era have their own internal dadaist logic which is fantastic that's a great song when did you start really getting into music um you know i started listening to folk music a lot and my my area is a very uh strong tradition of of songs um scottish irish folk songs but you know from newcastle they're called geordies and uh coal mining songs work songs sea shandies and then i got into american country music i used to listen to hank williams and got the hank williams song book and sat down with all the chord shapes and learnt four chord three chord songs johnny cash of course but uh you know my musical education was very wide my mother was a piano player and she'd bring records into the house he brought 78 of elvis presley and uh gerald lee lewis little richard my dad liked uh big band jazz and sinatra and then the bbc there's only one radio station right right you play everything from you know beethoven's fifth to the beatles and so you've got this sense that music was a broad spectrum and not just this kind of thing that advertisers designed you know let's just appeal to 19 year olds it was everything and so music for me is a is a common language and i like to be able to speak with all musicians this weekend i'm working with an orchestra and you know i pride myself on knowing how that that thing works and being able to discuss arrangements with those people so music for me is a spectrum dom did you uh grow up in the same way that listen um yeah i'm just the beatles of course you know a cross section of i'm going i was brought up in south america so that was a huge influence on on my musical upbringing you know like uh you're born is buenos aires yeah so argentine music and brazilian music was was always there when i was a kid so that mixed with the beatles and the stones and paul simon simon and garfunkel yes i mean it's all the same stuff and kind of got in to my skin do you feel like you were lucky sting to have been born when you were because your guys were inventing the language there's not a lot left to invent not there's nothing left to invent but it's very hard to stay within the parameters is that that people will accept as popular music and do something original with it you know every time we think we've hit the wall culturally there's a way through we have hit a wall and we're all searching for the way through um so i i'm not entirely pessimistic i have a sense of optimism i'm looking for everyone's looking for someone some genius will break the wall down ah this is where we need to go but you know i mean modern symphonic music has can't get past the 12-ton scale i mean it's a it's a massive cliff but uh i'm hopeful and i mean i think it's music and society and history are all very much wound up you know we're stuck at the moment i think uh it's like it seems like every 30 years there's some big shake up and i think the last time that happened was 30 years ago with with nirvana yeah where they just like er do you remember that yeah maybe that was we were on tour at the time i remember seeing that video on on mtv and thinking what the hell is that and it just since then everything kind of changed and so we're due for another and i see i'm not pessimistic either i'm sure there's something out there ready to be revealed do you think that the way that young people consume music though with spotify playlists being recommended to them you know uh using algorithms that that changes the way that there's so many good things about the way you can you can stream anything that you can think of if any any recording you can access almost immediately and that's a wonderful tool for a learning tool at the same time it reduces music into a commodity where you can turn on like coffee and respected less you know music 200 years ago you had to go and walk 20 miles maybe on a sunday to hear it in church or a concert once in a blue moon uh or buying a record you you take it out of the out of the sleeve and the inner sleeve and you'd lovingly ritually place it on the thing and the stylus would go on and the white noise that was a religious exercise for me that doesn't exist anymore it's coming back of course vinyl's coming back but that sense of an artifact that means something to you and the liner notes you would pour through every sentence and every even you who played on it where you know where the bands they'd been in before who engineered the thing you knew all that information now the commodity just it just fills the glass and you drink it talk about why that's important what and i i totally agree with this 100 percent about it's important to make the connection not not just who made the records who's in the band yeah who are the players everybody knew who the beatles were they knew every indiv they knew who all the stones were they knew all who the police were they knew all your individual names there should be a way in the streaming world where you can access all of that information where everything can be when you hit the credits on spotify it'll just show you the songwriter credits at least when i when i look on there i don't see who's the information who or the producers or the engineers things like that those things are important especially to the but there's a whole universe of information that that's useful yeah people and it's out there but it's not connected with the music like it was on the album cover and the liner notes were very important to records as well but it seems like records the album the reason why the album is kind of slowly becoming extinct is i think is because uh originally it was enough music that you could fit on a on a vinyl which is uh five songs either side because you could only get 38 minutes or something yeah and so we're stuck with that model and uh the young generation now i don't think they really identify with uh 10 songs as a collection they just want to hear one song i still think in that model though i still think about a size and b sides so do i you know putting a song at the end of the side day where you would be compelled to turn it over yeah while we're sitting it doesn't make any sense really that's the way i think yeah we're obsessing about the order of of of an album you know this should be the opening tracks like you spend days on it and nobody gives it well you don't want the same key back to back or you know the same tempo you need to have i i think in terms of albums i like people to think of buying our records and listening to it for 40 minutes so do i you know i may be being naive and unrealistic the ritual of turning it over was was good that's when you would put the kettle on again and discuss what you heard on side a and then listen to side b you know like a like a pink floyd album it's like you're halfway through dark side of the moon i mean like there's a lot to digest there to talk about and then enjoy the second half you know when a new police record would come out and i'd go to the store to buy it you didn't know what was going to be on it you'd hear the rate the song of the first single on the radio then you'd buy the album and you'd sit there oh i can't wait to hear this what is it going to be like i remember the when ghost in the machine came out just sounded the record the dark reverbs and things like that and you had every little thing she does is magic which it's one of the most interesting weirdest songs once again there's no sign at all like it was that song a demo that the band that you had stuart open play over can you tell me about that i demoed it in montreal and what the colonel that interested the kernel of interest for me was that was the whole tone scale on the bass you know and then that led me to a very ordinary chorus in a major key but um yeah i took it to the band and it wasn't really a police song i had keyboards on it so i had to fight hard to put that i said this is the flagship right all the dense stuff all that dark stuff needs somebody waving the flag and this is it and so i convinced them and eventually stewart played a fantastic he played one of his best drum parts on that yes he did he really did took a lot of work though a lot of convincing but you know i knew he could do it so he's a fantastic drama did you have he's amazing did you have a multi-track of it that you brought in and you played over it and andy played over i would do that yeah okay yeah annoy the hell out of them but the chorus is actually not ordinary maybe it's a three-chord chorus but every single phrase you change the bass figure the the rhythm of it why not i know right is that something that you're just okay i'm just jamming on this and just jumping just jamming right i wasn't i mean i i we still play that song on the set you know and i i never played the same thing twice really i was looking for an incremental change in every arrangement that when we do the song a song that could have been written 40 years ago i always find something tiny but either in the way i sing it or the way i play the bass or we've arranged something different that keeps the song alive a song is a living artifact it's an organism it's not a it's not a museum piece you know it's living so you have to breathe oxygen into it if you would play that a song like that what would you play generally speaking with my rule with police songs is who am i to put my my kind of uh personality into this it's already there so for what for two reasons i play the guitar parts the way they're like roxanne or every breath or walking on the moon the way they are one because they're really good parts yeah and secondly because i want the audience to know that i appreciate those parts and what andy did you know it's like i'm not going to come here and do my thing so it's very easy for me and very very satisfying because they're such good songs i never get tired of playing those songs and i've played them thousands of times you know and it's it's never boring ever to play every breath you take for instance which i could probably play in a coma you know he's been known to really was that the 90s we're talking about no okay okay could i get you guys to play a song here what do you want play what have we got here play whatever you'd like yeah that's right would you want to play like i don't know let's do every little thing yeah there you go [Music] though i tried before to tell her of the feelings i have for her every time that i come near her i just lose my nerf as i've done [Music] [Music] do i have to tell the story of a thousand rainy days since we first met it's a big enough umbrella but it's almost me that ends up killing [Music] before was tragic now i know my love for her goes on a little she does magic everything but even though my life before was tragic [Music] [Applause] away [Music] must i always you get the idea it's funny you mentioned that song because i've never really known what to play on that song yeah it's very un-guitaristic i've never really figured it out and also we're playing it in a different key and it's just like it's on the record it's a lot brighter in the brighter key but we just for one reason or another we changed the key probably to fit the narrative of the song before or the one after or there's a reason for it corridor no it was early in the set and singing up high c that early was not good because we shifted a good third line or something like a third yeah so play me a song off the new record now these are songs that you guys are uh for hold up oh yeah yeah um some d two three [Music] what would my mom do what would a man not say [Music] what would a mind that agreed to [Music] what would he not betray [Music] where would a mind feel to trespass [Music] what price would a man [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] veins by the pulse of my beating heart [Music] by the sun up in heaven by the moon and stars by the circling planets on the lines on the surface the surface of mars [Music] what would a man [Music] beautiful the record comes out this week seeing your records come out anymore really though they just they just kind of appear they materialize they materialize well it's coming out in vinyl and it's coming out on cassette did you know that we've gone really retro it's coming out amazing and uh friday's the release date but we've had a couple of singles you know to get people's interests that'd be a good reason to take my old car out there's a cassette player at it what about eight track no that was a failed experiment in my opinion so sting one thing i'd like to ask you about here is what do you want to be remembered for um i'm proud of the songs that we've written over the years and the body of work you know asking me what's your favorite song i don't have a favorite song it's all one song you know it's all explorations of of my subconscious and my musical knowledge what i've gleaned you know and there's so much yet to learn but i'm proud of how far we've got and if this was it i'd i'd be perfectly happy the legacy's fine i'm proud of my kids too my family but uh i'm proud of those songs it's been an honor to be able to talk to you both i really appreciate you guys being here today and uh thank you for taking the time and playing looking forward to the new record coming out and i hope to someday hang out again with you guys let's do it a pleasure to talk to you thank you thank you so much that's a wrap nice conversation got me to play yesterday you could have said no that's no that's that's your trademark dominance it's a trademark you do you do a nice paul simon song too no because i do i play a lot of i play a lot of classic songs with one wrong chord you know he likes it it amuses him it takes a real musician to make that choice yeah do you remember victor board yeah oh yeah that's the whole thing was that yeah

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 634,395

Rating: 4.97826 out of 5

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, the police, the soul cages, the police every breath you take, Sting, stewart copeland, Andy Summers, the police message in a bottle, the police walking on the moon, the police roxanne, the police synchronicity

Id: efRQh2vspVc

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dead_wet_flesh_jets]

This was great. I wish Sting was a bit less 'diplomatic' with his answers and more loose, but this was great as a Sting solo work fan.

[u/cytme]

I wish he’d asked Dominic some more questions.