‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
Last week, we ranked the 30 Best Police Covers. We debated at the time whether to group Sting solo songs into that list. Ultimately, we decided that Sting’s solo songs are just too different—more mellow, more adult-contemporary, and, most importantly, missing two essential ingredients that made The Police The Police. So, today, a bonus list rounding up ten killer covers of songs from Sting’s post-Police career.
Photo by Yancho Sabev via Wikimedia Commons
10. Ellie Goulding — Fields of Gold
Ellie Goulding’s “Fields of Gold” cover is light with simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, and, when you only listen to the song, you hear barely-there strings. If you watch the video, though, you see that this delicate sound takes a full orchestra behind the scenes. Without the percussion and other instrumental variation, this cover loses the moodiness of the original, but the overall effect of stripping everything down gives the song a more mournful tone. Sting almost stubbornly doesn’t question that you’ll remember him; Goulding sounds like she is afraid you won’t. — Sara Stoudt
9. The Duhks — Love Is The Seventh Wave
“Love Is The Seventh Wave” is one of those closest to the style of Sting’s earlier band, with Afro-caribbean textures lilting out all over the groove. The Dukhs, a Canadian folk fusion band, see immediate parallel with their own bluegrass Appalachiana, and their version, which does little other than to swap out all the original instrumentation for theirs, has found a link that many might not have appreciated. It features banjo, fiddle, guitar, percussion, and vocals from a guesting Aoife O’Donovan. And, yes, like the original, there is that little snatch of “Every Breath You Take” in the mix. — Seuras Og
8. The Tierney Sutton Band — Seven Days
There are many tribute albums to Sting—almost all of which in the vein of light vocal jazz. Most of them, frankly, are pretty sleepy. Elevated elevator music, let’s call it. The Tierney Sutton Band’s 2016 album The Sting Variations is the best one I found. Sutton covers a bunch of Sting solo and Police cuts, often digging pretty deep. “Seven Days,” for instance, comes off Sting’s lesser-known 1993 album Ten Summoner’s Tales. It’s a joy when Sutton sings it, though. The Grammy committee apparently thought so too; The Sting Variations was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album that year. — Ray Padgett
7. Cassandra Wilson — Fragile
“Fragile” was the fourth single from Sting’s second solo album, …Nothing Like the Sun, a title nicked from a Shakespearian sonnet. Like much of that album, it is relatively quiet with a political message—it’s a tribute to an American civil engineer killed by the Contras in Nicaragua. Sting proudly made it clear that he played the acoustic guitar on the track, which fittingly has a light Latin flavor.
Cassandra Wilson covered the song on her 2003 album Glamoured, shifting the sound towards Brazilian pop, and highlighting her distinctive, smoky voice and the delicate guitar playing of producer Fabrizio Sotti. Wilson’s delivery makes the song also seem more about personal relationships than politics. — Jordan Becker
6. Dolapdere Big Gang — Englishman in New York
What better way to celebrate this well mannered and most English of songs than with some Turkish folk fumes? It shouldn’t work, and the lyrics underscore that discrepancy enormously. Yet, against all those odds, it works a treat. Dolapdere Big Gang are a band of young Roma musicians, based in Istanbul, playing Western pop hits in a traditional Turkish style. Quite why this song was chosen may still frankly baffle, other than the melody, which feels surprisingly at home alongside the Bosphorus. — Seuras Og
5. Natalie Cole — If I Ever Lose My Faith In You
Best known for her triumphant “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)”—another song of abiding faith in an unidentified “you”—Natalie Cole later in her career turned to pop and rock fare like Sting’s “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You.” She may hit the high notes with the sharp accuracy of her younger years, but it’s Cole’s heart that comes across with the most clarity. Hers is a lavish arrangement meticulously polished. Not nearly as commercially successful as Cole’s dance-pop “Pink Cadillac” cover, but satisfying nonetheless. — Tom McDonald
4. Gregory Porter — It’s Probably Me
Using musical ideas Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton wrote for their score of the original Lethal Weapon, Sting’s song about the reluctance of men to share their feelings was nominated for a Grammy and an MTV movie award after its use in the third Lethal Weapon movie. In 2017, Sting was awarded Sweden’s Polar Music Prize. Jazz vocalist Gregory Porter performed at the ceremony and he made the idiosyncratic choice of performing this relative deep cut. Porter, backed by a band and orchestra, really throws himself into it. Sting’s original vocal is cool and maybe contains a wink at the lyrics (which were inspired, in part, by Riggs and Murtaugh’s relationship). Porter sings it straight and invests every line with emotion.
The performance builds to a crescendo where Porter vamps on the refrain, using every ounce of his voice, even almost breaking at one point. It’s a full-throated performance investing the song with whole new levels of emotion. And check out that pedal steel solo which substitutes for Clapton’s original, too. — Riley Haas
3. The Battlefield Band — We Work the Black Seam
The Battlefield Band were almost more an institution than an act, a constant on Scotland’s vibrant trad folk and beyond scene across several decades, with an always intelligent use of keyboards, alongside fiddle and bagpipes, marking them apart from their peers. Able to spot an opportunity with new songs, this polished take on this ode to coal, an attack on its politicised demise, draws out all the bitterness of the lyric. The singer here is Alistair Russell, like Sting from England’s North-East, and the Northumbrian pipes of Dougie Pincock add the local color as Brian McNeill and Alan Reid tease out any number of musical nuances around the understandably angry lyric. — Seuras Og
2. Johnny Cash — I Hung My Head
Sting grew up watching Westerns. That’s how he ended up writing “I Hung My Head,” a song that feels like it was written for someone like Johnny Cash. Because he’s Sting, he performed this song about an accidental murder in the Old West in 9/8, with horns. So Johnny Cash did indeed record it, as was foretold, and he did so for the American IV, his fourth record with Rick Rubin and the last album released in his lifetime.
Cash and co. put the song in 4/4, which other covers have followed since (because it’s easier and because this version is good). Recorded less than a year before his death, Cash’s voice on his version is raspy and full of pathos. He’s accompanied only by guitar, resonant piano and some other keyboard. Like so many of Cash’s covers he did for the American series, it’s hard not to think of this song as his after hearing his version. It’s not just the subject matter, which, as I said, feels like it was written specifically for Cash. It’s the way Cash sings this song about actions and consequences. It has that combination of gravitas and raw emotion that so many of his final covers possess. — Riley Haas
1. Eva Cassidy — Fields of Gold
“I heard this voice and it was so beautiful, so pure. And the next thing I hear, it’s almost a year later, and Terry Wogan is playing it on Radio 2. Then lo and behold, it’s number one in England and I’m happy for her. Even though it’s a sad tragic story, it has kind of a poetry about it.”
That’s Sting talking about his discovering Eva Cassidy’s cover of his “Fields of Gold” after her passing. It’s a shame that Sting, like most of us, only learned about Cassidy after she was gone, but how blessed are we that she left this behind for us. — Patrick Robbins
