In this TED Talk featuring Sting titled, "How I Started Writing Songs Again" he asks, "What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed?"
This isn’t your average TED Talk. The celebrated songwriter Sting (Gordon Sumner) shares his thoughts on a period of his life when the songs failed to come and how they came again. According to him, this happened by re-entering his rejected and somewhat spurned territory and community. I felt myself reminded and encouraged that while I sometimes feel writing as burdensome for its constant need of fine-tuning, it holds me together far more tightly than any devotion that I have ever shown to it.
I hope you enjoy this Talk (and Song) from one who has given so much to us with his careful and loving attention to his gift and his gods. He is also a good storyteller. I read his autobiography a few years ago, and scenes from it are included in this musical presentation. His childhood was spent in the literal shadow of a shipyard in England and that was the shore from which his fantasies were cast.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Talk
published May 30, 2014
published May 30, 2014
Excerpt:
"Well, they say write what you know. If you can’t write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it’s ironic that the landscape that I worked so hard to escape from, and the community I’d more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to, to find my missing muse. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, the songs started to come thick and fast."
Cover Art: Rendering of a shipyard for "The Soul Cages" 1991
One of his most widely beloved songs sung at the end of the talk is appropriately, “SOS Message in a Bottle”. This was one of his early hits with the band The Police. The three of those shaggy blondes jumped around on MTV with Punk Rock, Jazz and Reggae blending into the mostly undiscerning ears of my fellow teens as we embraced the second British Invasion forty years ago. Even after his abrupt departure from the seaside to London, he carried its influence with him, whether intended or not.
Perhaps the longevity of Sting’s craft and career is due to his early discontent to stay in that shadow of the shipyard, and the resulting alienation mixed with inspiration and ambition, and a hope that others were sending out the same messages. How young he was to realize:
“Seems I’m not alone in being alone”
And here he is honored for how much we all need to hear that:
Bruno Mars sings at Kennedy Center Honors 2014
"And yet if you look at your work, could it be argued that your best work wasn’t about you at all? It was about somebody else. Did your best work occur when you side-stepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story but told someone else’s story? Someone, perhaps, without a voice. Where empathetically you stood in his shoes for a while, saw the world through his eyes."
Autobiography Broken Music published by Dial Press Trade 2005
However, we can also be glad that he told us his story through his eyes, through his music and his memoirs.
NOTE: Just this year Sting received a BMI award for "Every Breath You Take" becoming the most played song in radio history.
