Sting Libri

Rock music; for voice and piano, with chord symbols and guitar chord diagrams.

Gordon Matthew Sumner, Sohn eines Milchmanns, arbeitete als Bauarbeiter und wurde Lehrer. Doch die Idee, eine eigene Band gründen zu wollen, ging ihm nicht aus dem Kopf. »The Police« stürmte ab 1978 die Charts, und danach tat es Sting solo. Hier legt er zum ersten Mal eine umfassende Sammlung seiner Lieder vor und kommentiert ihre Entstehung. Er schildert, wie er in Paris in einem schäbigen Hotel an Cyrano de Bergerac denkend »Roxanne« schrieb, und warum er den Song immer noch mag. Er erzählt, welche ganz persönlichen Anteile es in seinen Texten gibt und wie ein kleiner Gedanke alles in Bewegung bringen kann. Unprätentiös und poetisch, bisweilen wild, dann wieder melancholisch. Sting eben.

'I pore over Beatles albums with the same obsessive and forensic scrutiny that I'd applied to Rodgers and Hammerstein, only now I have a guitar. I have an instrument that can reproduce the practical magic of the chord structures and the network of riffs that their songs are built on. And what songs, one after the other, album after album. I learn to play them all, confident that if I persevere, what I can't play immediately will yield its secret eventually. I will reapply the needle of the record player again and again to the bars of music that seem beyond my analysis, like a safecracker picking a lock, until the prize is mine. No school subject ever occupies as much of my time or energy. I'm not claiming that any kind of prescience about the future was at work here, but there was something in the driven and compulsive nature of this obsession that was unusual, something in the unconscious saying, "This is how you escape." "This is how you escape.'''

Sting’s evocative lyrics from "King of Pain" are powerfully transformed into minimalistic illustrations by Sven Völker, who gives voice to his son's journey from illness to health in this extraordinary and deeply moving collaboration that explores pain’s sadness, beauty, and wonder.