Sting, Brand New Day
Featured Album
Sting skews bright and optimistic
The title song comes by its breezy soulfulness naturally, with Stevie Wonder on harmonica. It ends this stylistically diverse album, full of millennial thoughts, on a tone of optimism. The global layovers this time include Algerian rai music, courtesy Cheb Mami on "Desert Rose," Brazilian bossa nova on "Big Lie, Small World", and perhaps the ethnic suburbs of Paris in "Perfect Love…Gone Wrong," which has two long segments in French featuring the female rapper Sté. "Fill Her Up," however, is a strange country music fantasy about a guy working at a rural gas station, with a judgmental moral lesson about impulsiveness. "Tomorrow We'll See" with clarinet this time by Branford Marsalis, is sung from the point of view of a prostitute so intelligent and self-aware that she could be the character on which Woody Allen based his famous short story, "The Whore of Mensa."
