Sting

Focusing on special moments that have resonated throughout his career, the singer explores the early part of his life from childhood to adolescence, right up to the eve of his success with the Police, in his "New York Times"-bestselling memoir.

Sting and The Police have been global stars ever since their first hit with Roxanne. Now, for the first time, Sting has collected his song lyrics since 1978 and publishes them in a handsome hardback volume. LYRICS is a comprehensive collection of Sting's song lyrics spanning his entire career from the early days of the The Police through to Sacred Love, his latest album. Song lyrics are presented in album order, and coupled with newly-written commentary by Sting about the lyrics, the records, and his career as a songwriter in general. The book is enhanced by wonderful photographs from every period. This beautifully-produced hardback - featuring a two-colour designed interior over its 270 pages - is the ideal keepsake for the artists' fans. Timed to follow the wave of excitement following the internationally sold-out reunion tour,

Sting rememora, a partir de la experiencia con una droga visionaria del Amazonas, la primera mitad de su vida, con una prosa depurada que provocará en el lector la sensación de estar escuchándole en

Durante la mayor parte de mi vida me he dedicado a escribir letra de canciones, a condensar mis ideas y emociones en pareados y ponerles música. En cambio, nunca había considerado la posibilidad de escribir un libro hasta que llegue a la reflexiva edad de los cincuenta.

Those expecting to find lurid tales of rock & roll excess with the Police in Sting''s candidly written, minutely detailed autobiography, BROKEN MUSIC, should probably look elsewhere; the only drug taking here is courtesy of a Brazilian religious ceremony. The experience prompts hallucinogenic recollections on the part of the author and forms the basis of the book''s journey through a childhood fraught with guilty silences (he catches his mother kissing one of his father''s employees), his first sexual and musical experiments, a prolonged period of struggle and penury as a young musician with a wife and child to support (his recounting of the search for living quarters in London is particularly chastening), and the first tentative performances of the Police. The career of the latter is condensed into a few pages; Sting appears to be less concerned with conveying the pleasures of a lifestyle complete with jaunts to the Amazon, country houses, and rock & roll hedonism than he is with recounting the long, intriguing journey he''s made to get there.

From the first Police album, Outlandos DAmour, through Sacred Love, here are the collected lyrics written by Sting, along with his commentary.Publishing my lyrics separately from their musical accompaniment is something that Ive studiously avoided until now. The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and a pile of cloth. Nevertheless, the exercise has been an interesting one, seeing perhaps for the first time how successfully the lyrics survive on their own, and inviting the question as to whether song lyrics are in fact poetry or something else entirely. And while Ive never seriously described myself as a poet, the book in your hands, devoid as it is of any musical notation, looks suspiciously like a book of poems. So it seems I am entering, with some trepidation, the unadorned realm of the poet. I have set out my compositions in the sequence they were written and provided a little background when I thought it might be illuminating. My wares have neither been sorted nor dressed in clothes that do not belong to them; indeed, they have been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the first place. No doubt some of them will perish in the cold cruelty of this new environment, and yet others may prove more resilient and become perhaps more beautiful in their naked state. I cant predict the outcome, but I have taken this risk knowingly and, while no one in their right mind should ever attempt to set The Waste Land to music, in the hopeful words of T. S. Eliot, These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Sting, from the Introduction

Stings gift for prose and reverence for language, nearly the equal of his musical gifts, shine on every page. Even when Broken Music addresses the quixotic life of an aspiring rock & roller, it reads like literature from a more rarified time when adults didnt condescend to the vulgarities of pop culture. Rolling StoneHaving been a songwriter most of my life, condensing my ideas and emotions into short rhyming couplets and setting them to music, I had never really considered writing a book. But upon arriving at the reflective age of fifty, I found myself drawn, for the first time, to write long passages that were as stimulating and intriguing to me as any songwriting I had ever done. And so Broken Music began to take shape. It is a book about the early part of my life, from childhood through adolescence, right up to the eve of my success with the Police. It is a story very few people know. I had no interest in writing a traditional autobiographical recitation of everything thats ever happened to me. Instead I found myself drawn to exploring specific moments, certain people and relationships, and particular events which still resonate powerfully for me as I try to understand the child I was, and the man I became.