After ten years of live albums, reimaginings of his catalogue and lute music, Sting is finally returning to the studio to record a new material.
Sting photo by Ros O'Gorman
The Last Ship is scheduled for release this fall according to the New York Times. The songs are from a musical that Sting is writing for a possible 2014 Broadway run about the shipyard in his hometown of Wallsend, England.
Sting has been writing the songs for over three years with collaborators John Logan, who just won an Academy Award for the song Skyfall, and Brian Yorkey who wrote the musical Next to Normal. Of the songs on the album, some will be included in the final production while others have been cut from the show.
From the Times article:
The songs on “The Last Ship” were written to advance the play’s plot, and so they hew to story-telling needs. The title song is a waltz-time folk tune, heavy with Christian imagery and told in a Northern English dialect. It freights the launching of the last ship from the yard with spiritual significance. Another song, “And Yet,” is a jazzy funk number, sung from the point of view of a sailor arriving in his home port and wondering about a woman he left behind. “Dead Man’s Boots,” meanwhile, is a tense dialogue between a father who works in the shipyard and a son who wants to do something else with his life.
The Last Ship is scheduled for a September 24 release via Cherrytree, Interscope and A&M Records. Sting’s last studio album with original music was 2003’s Sacred Love.
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