I’m probably taking down what little cool rating I may have by saying this, but I like Sting. Everybody likes the Police stuff, and I bet a fair amount of you might cop to enjoying “Fields of Gold”, but who among you is brave enough to admit that you like Sting’s early jazz-lite solo records? And did you ever think you’d hear someone extolling the virtues of “The Soul Cages”, perhaps the most pretentious of albums from one of rock’s most singularly pretentious artists?
“Island of Souls”- Any album that starts out with an oboe solo has pure gold written all over it. This is probably the time to mention for the uninitiated that this is Sting’s concept album about the death of his father. So this opening song is a dirge-like affair about his father’s life working at the Newcastle shipyards. See that, Decemberist fans? Sting was doing sea-chanteys before you hipsters decided it would be cool! It takes two and a half minutes for any drums to appear on this track, which is evidence that Sting means business. This album was released fifteen years before Sting picked up the lute and recorded a mess of Elizabethean songs, but the melody of this song (despite its more modern arrangement) is reminiscent of older folk music, and it is clear that Sting is more concerned with creating mood and telling a story than providing an kind of hooks. Which is fine. Here comes that oboe again.
“All This Time”- The single off the record, and probably the only one you’ve ever heard. I’m not sure, but this might have beat “Losing My Religion” to the punch with the “hit single with mandolin as lead instrument” thing. The lyrics to this song are amazing. Seriously. I’ve actually had my creative writing classes analyze them, as I think they tell a pretty remarkable story and contain some great images, which were then almost satirized in the music video for the song. Most kids today have never heard this song, so after we look over the lyrics, I ask them to describe what kind of song they think it is, and they all uniformly agree that it must be a moribund ballad, and then are surprised when this crazy, up-tempo pop song asks them that “if Jesus exists, how come he never lived here.” I’ve been frightened to actually google the phrase “men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one” for fear that Sting didn’t actually write it. Although I will admit that even if it is a rip-off, it is still pretty damn pisser for Sting to include it as the closing lines of a pop song.
“Mad About You”- Nothing at all about Paul Reiser, unfortunately. I’m going to take a moment to set the scene for when I first fell in love with this record. When I was in eighth grade, the music channel VH1, which now shows primarily shows about mentally disturbed meth addicts in their quest for love, was primarily a channel showing the Rosie O’Donnell-hosted show Stand-Up Spotlight. But in the spring of 1993, VH1 executives opted to pre-empt this already five year old show from its round-the-clock airings to broadcast every music video A-Z by artist. In this pre-you tube era, this was the only way I was going to be able to see all the Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads videos that I’d only heard tale of. Squeeze through Talking Heads was broadcast while I was in school, so I devoted an entire 6 hour VHS tape to capture what amounted to 14 minutes of music videos that I actually wanted to watch. The video for “All This Time” was featured between Squeeze and Talking Heads, and to be more specific, right after Lisa Stan field’s “Been Around the World.” to be continued.
Jeremiah Blues (Part 1) I love songs that have titles followed by parentheses. Somewhere in the vast castle Sting lives in is a track called Jeremiah Blues (Part 2) and maybe, I live in hope, Jeremiah Blues (Part 3). Actually paying attention to this song is kind of unpleasant. It sounds a lot like all the non-single songs from his follow-up album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” and only works on the album as a brief reprieve from the slower more melancholy songs. Did I mention this is an album about Newcastle shipyards and the death of the singer’s father? This song doesn’t really belong here.
(I know it was 1991, but where other than the 18th century British Navy is this haircut acceptable?)
“Why Should I Cry for You?” - I think if I were stopped at a traffic light and my windows were down I’d be embarrassed and change the song right away, but it would be betraying the 13-year old RJT who still lives inside me to claim that I didn’t sincerely love this song. There is some great B3 organ played by either the late, great Kenny Kirkland or the great but still not late David Sancious, more famous for being the guy who quit the E-Street Band right after they cut “Born to Run.” I love the way that Sting changes up the chorus near the end, so that when you’re singing along (and you would be if you here were listening with me) you inevitably get mixed up. Again, I think this is an album that plays very well while you’re listening to it, but certain parts of it seem weird when listened to in isolation. Example: the longest insrumental fade-out in history.
“Saint Agnes and the Burning Nun”- No concept album would be complete without the instrumental song with the intriguing title. What is this song about? Who set this nun on fire? This sounds like it is an Elizabethan ballad. I imagine in the vinyl days when this record was released, this opened side two and served as some kind of interlude piece.
(I don't know what song from this record he could be playing that require that high of a jump. Either that or Sting gets really into funereally paced songs about shipping docks.)
“The Wild Wild Sea”- Getting back to my personal history with this album, while I let Sting’s band do the weird opening vamp to this song: having been intrigued and captivated by the video for “All This Time” I order this CD from BMG music club, which is the equivalent of having a craving for steak some night in July and telling your mother you think they should have it for Christmas dinner. You wait a long time, especially when you’re 13, for BMG to actually send you these CDs and so it was several months before I found myself in the mood to sit down and really listen to this album once it arrived. The mood? It was a rainy and dark summer morning, and I was sitting in the basement of my father’s house being age-appropriately miserable. This song follows the model of “Island of Souls” in that it’s kind of shapeless. It must be hard for a band to play a song like this, that doesn’t seem to follow any kind of pattern and just seems to be a musical bed for Sting to continue his story of a man aboard a ship who sees the ghost of his father. Someone (I’m going to guess Sting) thought it was a good idea to include sound effects to simulate a storm at sea. The band gets a chance to jam out a bit near the end, which you have to imagine they’ve been waiting for since they started playing this song.
“The Soul Cages”- I really really loved this song when I was 13. It’s a pretty rocking song in the context of everything else. The guitars have a certain crunch to them that would’ve appealed to me the summer of 93, when distortion pedal sales must’ve been at an all time high. This song also has the strongest melody since “All This Time” while continuing the lyrical theme of death and the sea. There’s one unfortunate bit in the song where Sting tries to sing “tortured human soul” but doesn’t have the beats to fit it in, and with his faux Jamaican accent he sometimes uses, it sounds like he says the word “Jew” instead of human, and I had to consult the lyric sheet back then to make sure that’s not what he sang.
“When the Angels Fall”- I’ve been having a lot of fun poking fun at some of the more ridiculous pretentious flourishes of this album, but it would be unfair of me to give anybody the impression that I don’t still love this album. I’m not sure that if I heard it for the first time when I was 30, instead of when I was 13, I would feel the same, but I still put this album on each summer, and I certainly appreciate the lyric writing above all else, plus the bravery/arrogance of being at the time among the biggest pop stars in the world, and making as difficult and obtuse an album as The Soul Cages is. This last track is in the vein of “Island of Souls” and “The Wild Wild Sea.” It’s relatively shapeless, and needlessly long. The melody is a little bit stronger than those two, and it does build up to an appropriate crescendo for an album like this, and the final part of this song, where the band and Sting alike seem to pick up in intensity are really powerful. As “When the Angels Falls” builds to a crescendo, Manu Katche hits the snare one last time and as it reverberations echo out, Sting says plaintively “Good night.” And the record ends. If only he could come tuck me in as well.
The album may be overly earnest overall, but it’s the kind of thing that really speaks to an overly-serious 13-year old kid, and while maybe most of my peers were finding Pearl Jam’s 10 providing them with the same level of heavy and serious music, I’m really glad that I had Sting’s opus to his father. My room in my father’s basement was dark and poorly lit, but had surround speakers, which allowed me to get completely immersed in a record in a way I don’t think I could now. Even if that record is basically built around three dirge-like pieces interspersed with three pretty great pop tunes, two utterly forgettable ones, and one instrumental with a name like an obscure Swedish film
BUY THIS RECORD
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