A Sting Thing
It's hard to explain, but I still need him.
Where do you go when you feel ungrounded and lost to yourself? I can always find myself in music, in certain songs and records. Sting is part of a small cohort of artists, including Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Kate Bush, Bono, and Sinead O’Connor, whose voices I know intimately, as I’d been raised in a house with them. You can needle-drop me into their records and I’m on the path again, the last few blocks that lead back home.
Because I’ve spent my whole life listening to people’s voices, and because some of my superpowers are connected to that realm, I can hear overtones in Sting’s voice that indicate a truly superior musical gift. He can be high and keening, moving up into territory that is distinctly feminine and vulnerable. Yet he also has a burnished bronze timbre in his lower range that rumbles the earth. Dynamically he is also flawless. He can roar like a hurricane or purr like a pussy.
The tone of his voice, and much of his lyrical output (especially his work from 1979-2000), is suffused with desire. Not just for sex, but also for self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. He even seems in dialogue with the Divine Feminine principle of the erotic as power. I can lean against his voice and feel it pressing me back into shape, as the same hopes, fears and questions spring to life inside my heart. They are as thrumming and vibrant as the very first time they appeared. Yet somewhere in there I can also feel how mistakes, intuitions and inspirations have shaped the course of my life, and made deep changes in the way I live and walk through the world. On balance, I think this is beautiful, and I feel deeply grateful.
Come to think of it, gratitude is the thing that brings me back to myself. The world feels overwhelming, the sheer scale of the chaos threatening to obscure our individual and collective humanity. How can we continue to show up in gratitude, every day, for our one wild and precious life? How can we stay grounded and centered in ourselves and each other? Generally I feel seen and heard by the people I care about. Beyond that I don’t need a ton of external validation. But sometimes I need Sting, and nothing else will do.
Joni. Especially Blue but also Court and Spark. The inimitable power of her music, the moving everyday poetry of her lyrics, and, of course, her angelic, incomparable voice.
There are so many singers I have in my treasure chest of must-listens to reunite me with myself. They range from Ella Fitzgerald to Joni Mitchell to Florence Welch. And lately I've been grounding through a lot of Michael Kiwanuka -- there is magic in that man's voice . . . and music!