Sting “The Soul Cages”
This is the middle-aged therapy album. Not the primal scream “Mama don’t go” therapy of 1970 John Lennon. This is erudite stuff -- real necktie and monocle material. A concert of this album would be advertised as “An Evening with Sting” and you could watch it seated. Once a spike-haired Rock god, Sting was standing on the precipice of Adult Contemporary, and he was unafraid.
“The Soul Cages” grew out of the death of Sting’s father, who had always wanted to be a sailor, but ended up a milkman. His son became a jet-setting Rock star, and the father had to watch the shipping industry in his town slowly die around him, robbing him of even vicarious pleasures. On “Soul Cages” Sting shapes ship and sailing motifs into a concept album about loss. The story starts with “Island of Souls” about a boy named Billy whose shipbuilder father gets injured in a workplace accident and has three weeks to live. in “All This Time” Billy takes the father out to sea, so that he may finish his life and be buried in the ocean. The son mourns his father in the album’s most beautiful song, “Why Should I Cry for You.” Then, after being lost at sea in “The Wild, Wild Sea” Billy ends up intercepted by some kind of demon sea king (yup) who traps the father’s spirit in a “Soul Cage”. Sting was a high school English teacher before he became a Rock star, which may be why he can’t quite just come out and say he misses his Dad.
The whole nautical motif of “The Soul Cages” doesn’t really have much impact unless you too had a father who always wanted to be a sailor. The meaning of getting your soul trapped in a cage and needing your son to release it so you can be at peace, gets lost unless you study the lyric sheet. Something about writing out this story and turning it into music helped Sting through the grieving process, but it cloaks and conceals its potential under a dense allegory. “Jeremiah Blues (Part 1)” has so much meaning, it had to be split into parts. Part 2 is not on the album or anywhere as far as I know. If found, I hope it’s a decoder ring to part 1. Sting, man of the quill, and Sting, man of the bass guitar, are not in harmony.
Like sailing, the problem in “The Soul Cages, is that there’s a lot of waiting around for wind. Half the tracks advance a story, if you’re paying attention, but feel more like well decorated waiting rooms than songs. This is very controlled, refined music with hints of Rock, contemporary Jazz, and Spanish guitar. If that sounds like a wine description, that’s about right. It’s definitely not for kids or anyone who needs things to rock for an album to be legitimate.
Rattling off the plot of your concept album in rhyme takes most people to Snoozetown, so it better be pretty simple and clear. Sting gets mixed reviews on this front. In opera or musical theater you have actors up there, you’re not all ear. On a stage, the humans draw you to the conflict held in the lyric.They’ve got faces to help create the intrigue and empathy, and it clicks in the narrative instinct in a way that doesn’t happen with a record. When it’s just ear, it’s pretty hard to get audiences to listen to lyrics, because sound takes the lead from words as the carrier of meaning. That’s why songs have choruses where you repeat the important words. It’s also why lyrics like “De-doo-run-run-run, de-doo-run-run” are totally legit. Music lovers are more likely to hear the music of the word than the content, anyway. Apparently, Soul Cages’ demon sea king keeps multiple cranky Dad souls in lobster traps? Is there a video that explains this?
“Mad About You” is a welcome break from the shipbuilder and son story, and one where Sting’s literary proclivities don’t sink the song. Here, a tale about a desperate, bewitched lover uses its Biblical and celestial references to elevate its lover’s’ obsession into something quite romantic. Sting’s often strained lyrical poetry translates here into welcomed costumed wooing. Cross-reference this with the appeal of Rudolph Valentino in “The Sheik,” Sting playing the exotic ancient lover. Certain women really go for this version of him. And why not? He’s the sexy English teacher: learned, sensitive and yet, a bit aloof. They wait for him to open up, only to them. And then he has that tantric sex with them for two days. This bit of biography about his and his wife’s tantric sex marathons that spilled out in the 90s was a clutch PR move. It’s what likely keeps any straight men listening. How does this guy do it? I want this erotic power for myself. Maybe a mock turtleneck fisherman’s sweater will help.
Or maybe the problem is that Sting, and in particular his style of writing, works better in a costume we’re familiar with, like the obsessive romantic. I seem to go along easily when he’s stalking someone, through “every breath you take, every move you make.” But I trip up following the son in the confusing mariner tale with its own mythology about the end of the shipping industry in Newcastle England. This album might work better if you just listen to the words as sounds or if you let the songs wash over you like a Jungian dream and let the therapist figure out what water means.
The literary issue is a serious problem for Sting. He reaches for high art, but he needs a step stool. There’s a surrealist painting on the front of the album that’s pleasing enough to the eye. It’s maybe a brown ship-shaped blob in repair? Maybe a soul propped up on sticks? That’s the problem with this concept album. When pressed, you don’t really get the concept. Gloom and lobsters? Whatever his accomplishments, this is the man whose final report card will state that he wrote and sang a lyric rhyming “cough” with “Nabokov” and wrote a song that rhymed “Brontosaurus” with “lesson for us”. On “Soul Cages”, we have the puzzling line: “Where is the fisherman, where is the goat?”