With a classic catalog spanning five decades from the Police to his solo career, Sting says it never gets old when one of his songs gets a brand-new spin.
And the timeless tunes of the artist born Gordon Sumner get a fresh flip in the new dance theater production “Message in a Bottle,” which is “sending out an SOS” from New York City Center through Sunday.
“I always love to see someone else’s interpretation of one of my songs,” said the 17-time Grammy winner in a talkback following Sunday’s matinee performance. “I love it when rappers take a piece of my song and they create another art form from it as a basis.
“I always love when people have a different interpretation to the meaning that I put into it myself, because it widens the song. I never contradict people who have a totally different opinion.”
Take Sting’s signature song “Every Breath You Take,” which took the Police to No. 1 in 1983 — and then was famously sampled on Puff Daddy’s 1997 chart-topper “I’ll Be Missing You.”
“A lot of people think it’s about a stalker,” said Sting. “Some people get married to that song.”
For the record, when Sting wrote “Every move you make/Every step you take/I’ll be watching you,” he was imagining himself as Big Brother.
The O.G. King of Pain said that he connected with “Message in a Bottle” — choreographed by five-time Olivier Award nominee Kate Prince — through “the ability of dancers to express pain.”
“To dance is to know pain,” said Prince during Sunday’s talkback. “You can’t dance without going through pain every single day, and being resilient to tell the story of these people who are going through pain.”
And to Sting’s surprise, “Message in a Bottle,” which debuted on London’s West End in 2020, drove him to tears.
“I’m thinking, ‘How are they gonna shoehorn my songs into some kind of narrative?’ ” he said. “I don’t normally like that kind of thing.
“But after about 20 minutes of this incredible dancing, I started to cry. I don’t cry easily. And I was trying to analyze what was making me cry. And it was that these dancers had suddenly brought to life my own emotions, that I can only express poorly as a lyricist.”
Indeed, after all these years, Sting has been hearing his songs in a brand-new way.
“What they did was they filled those thoughts out, they filled those emotions out. And that made me understood,” he said.
“So when you’ve been misunderstood in your life, as all of us have, to suddenly be understood is a deeply, deeply profound emotional experience. And I had the same feelings this afternoon.”
