The musician Sting arrives in Chicago next week on the North American leg of his “Sting 3.0” tour. He and his bandmates will play four nights at the Auditorium Theatre over the course of a week on a tour that is mostly playing smaller to mid-sized venues like the Auditorium, with some stops for multiple nights. Chicago is one of the few cities to get four concerts.
There are no big backing bands or boldface guest musicians on this tour — no symphonies. The point of “Sting 3.0,” which also played Europe over the summer, is a more stripped-down version of Sting’s music, more like the early days. The former Police frontman is traveling with drummer Chris Maas, who has played with UK folkies Mumford & Sons, and longtime collaborator and guitarist Dominic Miller.
The “3.0” in the tour’s title is, on its face, a reference to the three musicians in the trio, though you can maybe hear the hint of a “version 3.0” of a musical career.
“Is this a third act? I don’t know. I mean, it’s ‘3.0,’ it’s kind of cryptic and funny,” Sting said in an interview with the Tribune before the tour began in Detroit. “The three of us make a lot of noise and we’re very happy, it’s been a lot of fun.”
As far as a music career, Sting’s stretches back almost 50 years, of course, from founding the Police in 1977 to a solo career that has dabbled in and out of jazz and worldbeat, to creating a Broadway musical that debuted in Chicago, to still releasing new music. His “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart),” out in early September, is his first new song since a 2021 album “The Bridge,” his 15th studio album.
That’s not even scratching the film work, the 17 Grammies, the collaborations — he’s also playing arena shows with Billy Joel this fall. The Police’s last reunion tour was in 2007 — another, rather more famous trio, it’s worth a mention. Safe to say that Sting has acquired a few more than three versions already.
Hence the approach on “3.0.”
“Just to have the bare essentials up on stage is an exciting prospect for me,” he said. “Stripping the songs down to their bare essentials really affirms that the songs are sturdy enough to withstand that kind of reduction.”
The setlists of the European dates mostly stuck to greatest hits — “Roxanne,” “Fields of Gold,” “Shape of My Heart.” This fall, they hope to shake that up a bit.
“I think in North America, because we’re playing theaters on multiple nights it gives us an opportunity to be a little more experimental. We usually front-load the set with hits, you have to play what people have come to hear, but that earns us the right to say, ‘OK, now we’re going to do something that maybe you’re not expecting.’ I’m not quite sure what that is yet. It could be a little acoustic set in the middle.”
Sting, who turned 73 at the start of October, said the point was not to do another arena tour, though he has nothing against arena tours.
“This has all been about trying to recreate the excitement of starting again,” he said. “I think when you play a large venue it does tend to dictate the music you play, it’s all about making big musical gestures. This is going the other way. I’m always looking for surprise, I want to surprise myself. ”
Most of all, he said, “I don’t want to become my own heritage act.”
About a decade ago, Sting wrote the score for a stage musical titled “The Last Ship,” with a story set in the shipbuilding industry in Wallsend, Northern England, where Sting (aka Gordon Sumner) grew up. The musical was a tribute to his father, who had worked in and around the shipyards, and to his own childhood. “The Last Ship” had its pre-Broadway world premiere in 2014 in Chicago at what’s now the CIBC Theatre and moved to Broadway later the same year. It earned two Tony nominations but only ran for a few months. Sting joined the cast for a few weeks in an attempt to boost ticket sales.
The story is centered on a prodigal son who returns home to find that his town’s shipyard is closing and Meg, the woman he loved, has a new life. Tensions build as workers take over the shipyard.
Sting says he’s still working on the show. There have been short-lived productions elsewhere since.
“I don’t think you ever finish something like that. I would consider that (show) my proudest legacy, actually. We’ve been approached by various opera companies around the world to put it on. I’ve always felt it had an operatic scale. The shipyard has an operatic scale and at least two characters die in it, so that’s my definition of an opera,” he said.
Sting has since contributed to another stage production; choreographer Kate Prince created a dance performance based on his music titled “Message in a Bottle” that debuted in London in 2020 and arrived in Chicago earlier this year.
Stings says he doesn’t borrow from the “Last Ship” score for his live shows. It’s not like he drops the title track or a number like “What Say You, Meg?” in the middle of a concert. Those songs feel like they need an orchestra behind them to work the way he wants them to, he said. “Although you never know, I might decide one night just to do it. Just for the hell of it.”
Asked about a personal favorite song from his catalog, he said, “Well, the hits have been very kind to me.”
He has no problem playing the songs his fans want him to play. In 2019, BMI reported that “Every Breath You Take” had become the most-played song in radio history. “I think you have to please an audience and say, ‘Look you’ve come for the hits. I’ll play you the hits.’ I always know when the audience gets their phones out that’s the song they’d be waiting to hear. … It’s a kind of visual applause. It’s very pretty.”
He also still tinkers with those songs, as familiar as they are. “I’m not there just to reproduce a record made 40 years ago. These things aren’t finished, they’re organic mechanisms. They’re not dead artifacts. They’re living. They’re living and breathing.”
In the other direction, has Sting ever written a song that he thinks should have been a hit but for some reason never was?
He laughed. “Well, I don’t have any regrets like that at all. I’d have to say no. Whether a song’s a hit or not, it actually is immaterial to me, I’ve had a fantastic amount of success and affirmation. I don’t need any more.”
“Sting 3.0” plays Oct. 28-29 and Nov. 1-2, with guest ELEW, at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive; tickets from $65 at auditoriumtheatre.org
dgeorge@chicagotribune.com
