Hardly encouraging, the day the interview with Sting is confirmed recently, the "quote of the day" on his website reads: "Most journalists seem to ask me the same questions the world over. They put a shape to my life and they think I'm going to slot neatly inside. To be honest though, I'm way past caring how people perceive me. It's their problem."
Great.
As it turns out, Sting seems to be unaware of the quote (what? he's not uploading those things onto the website himself?), doesn't exactly recall the context in which it was delivered, nor does he seem to have a problem with all those stories about him, anyway.
"I think generally it's the journalist's job to pigeonhole you, to put a label on you. And it's always been my job to kind of avoid those labels because as soon as you have a label on you, you're kind of trapped there," he said during a thoughtful, relaxed telephone interview, laughing easily and displaying that famously polished vocabulary of his.
"I understand the process and I think the dialectic works. I fight against it and you put me in a box. That's an interesting gladiatorial concept."
Sting has leaped outside the box this summer with his Symphonicities project: a new record and a giant live tour (the latter dubbed Symphonicity) featuring classical arrangements of classic hits from his days fronting the Police and his subsequent solo career: songs audiences know well enough to sing along with, "but dressed in completely different clothes," Sting, 58, says.
"I'm led by my curiosity and my desire to learn; to learn something new all the time. … I think the musical muscle, it needs to be flexible - for me, anyway."
Some tracks, such as Russians (inspired, to begin with, by Prokofiev) are naturals for the classical arrangements; others, in particular the hard-rocking Next To You, are surprises.
"My job is to keep these songs fresh. They may have been written 30, 35 years ago but my job is to sing them with as much energy as if I'd written them this afternoon," he said from his apartment in New York, home base for about a year now as his youngest child attends school there.
During a dreary cancellation-ridden summer for concert tours, Symphonicity - a massive undertaking involving his own band and the 45-piece Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra with Steven Mercurio conducting - is doing "surprisingly well," Sting says, "virtually selling out everywhere."
On Friday, the tour hits Toronto - the city whose allure was at least partly responsible for Sting's launch into music. "My uncle emigrated to Toronto in the late fifties and left me his guitar," he says. "So Canada has a lot to answer for."
The guitar, with its "five rusty strings," was good enough to help nine-year-old Gordon Sumner start writing songs.
"It became my dear friend. I didn't speak very much, but I'd sit in the corner and just play and mumble my songs. … I think my brother still has it. I think he kept it as a memento. I'd actually love to see it."
(One other Canada-Sting fun fact: His grandfather worked as an insurance rep for the Canadian company Sun Life.)
Not surprisingly, Sting, a long-time vocal environmentalist, has been watching events in the Gulf of Mexico closely. "We're in a catastrophic situation," he says. "I have no idea what to do. There has to be an answer, but we're in a pickle, no doubt about it. We have to stop oil companies behaving this way."
Musically these days he's listening to the Estonian composer Arvo Part and to I Blame Coco - the moniker his daughter records under, one of two of his children who have chosen musical careers (the other is his eldest, Joe Sumner, who fronts the band Fiction Plane).
"I've always said to them: 'Look, music is its own reward. Whether you're playing to three people or a pussycat or 10,000 people, it doesn't matter. Music is what you're doing it for.' And they say 'Well that's all right for you to say, Dad.' It may be so, but I'm still speaking the truth. Music is its own reward. And I think they got that. And they see me still practising every day. I still work hard at music."
While he indulges in new takes on old classics, Sting does not harbour much desire to perform those tunes with his old band again. The 2007-2008 Police reunion tour was an exercise in nostalgia that succeeded commercially but left Sting ambivalent. "It was both enjoyable and difficult at the same time," he says. "Stepping back to something that was 30 years old [was]not normal for me. It was kind of an unusual step for me to take, which is one of the reasons I made it. It was this kind of convoluted logic: Okay, what's the most surprising thing you can do? Oh, re-form the Police. People will be very shocked by that, so I'll do it. And I did it."
Would he do it again?
"No. Unless I think it's - I don't know. No. I never want to do it again." And a moment later: "You should never say never. But I'm saying never."
Sting and Symphonicity perform at Toronto's Molson Amphitheatre on Friday, Montreal's Bell Centre on Saturday and Ottawa's Scotiabank Place on Sunday ( tickets.sting.com).
Marsha Lederman