Canter Bridge

Despite criticism that it is eclectic to the point of distraction (sometimes expressed as `Has Sting run out of ideas?’), Brand New Day contains several of the finest songs of the entire final decade of the twentieth century. Sting being Sting, you wade through a couple of dry stretches on this album as on almost any of its level. Yet the gems are gorgeous, enduring glimpses of brilliance. The album’s opening track, `A Thousand Years’, may be the most splendidly lush love song to be performed in twenty years. Pulsing, obsessed with a love whose mathematics defy infinity, Sting in this profound statement of amour knows only one thing: I still love you.

No one creates a new sound like Sting. Among the not always convincing concoctions on a CD that gyrates like the stock market in a very insecure moment, storms forward `Desert Rose’. Sting and Algerian singer Cheb Mami, supported by enthralling orchestration, pull off a profoundly moving piece that must have seemed unlikely to Sting’s minders when he unveiled the concept. The lyrics are as evocative as the music itself:

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of fire
Those dreams that tie two hearts that will never die
And near the flames
The shadows play in the shape of the man’s desire

This desert rose
Whose shadow bears the secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume that would torture you more than this

And now she turns
This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams
This fire burns
I realize that nothing’s as it seems

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

I dream of rain
I lift my gaze to empty skies above
I close my eyes
The rare perfume is the sweet intoxication of love

I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand

Sweet desert rose
Whose shadow bears the secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume that would torture you more than this

Sweet desert rose
This memory of hidden hearts and souls
This desert flower
This rare perfume is the sweet intoxication of love

It is a marvel that Sting can sing with his tongue as firmly planted in cheek as `Big Lie Small World’ requires. Yet this tune, too, is vintage Sting: funny, cerebral, and self-deprecating all at once, punishing himself for a foolishly lost love and awash in a world of bigger, wealthier Alpha-males ready to harvest the affections of the woman who used once to be by his side

The aptly named `Ghost Story’ is a mesmerizing tale of regret, of love handed over too soon to lawyers who know nothing of nourishing such a child. One wishes, in the face of such poetic and musical mastery, to start life over again, to stay as far from this song’s conclusion as a human being can know how.

These are high points on an album that begs to be owned and turned over in the hand, held up to the light, from time to time contemplated for the treasure that is in it.

If Brand New Day signals that Sting has lost his way, then let’s follow him off into the bush, for the path has grown cold, unpromising, still.