For most artists, a work eventually reaches a point where it has to be let go. Albums are mixed, films are locked and books are sent to the printer. Not so for Sting.
More than a decade after The Last Ship first premiered, the former Police frontman is still rewriting, refining and reshaping the deeply personal musical inspired by his childhood in the shipbuilding town of Newcastle in England’s northeast. The production, which recently played in Amsterdam, Paris and Brisbane (Australia), arrives at New York’s Metropolitan Opera from June 9–14 and has become something of a living document — part memoir, part love letter to a disappearing working-class community and, perhaps most poignantly, an ongoing conversation with the parents whose lives helped inspire it.
When we sat down backstage in Brisbane, Sting spoke candidly about the musical’s long evolution, the catharsis of performing it night after night and why he still isn’t convinced the show is finished. Along the way he reflected on seeing Jimi Hendrix as a teenager, the songwriting lessons that have guided him for decades and why he believes human creativity will ultimately outsmart artificial intelligence.
“I think I’ve been writing the songs for this musical all my life,” he says at one point.
