Always known as a musical explorer, pioneering genre-bending sounds and collaborations, 17-time Grammy Award winner STING will release a new album, entitled Duets, on March 19, 2021. Fans can pre-order this special collection now: https://sting.lnk.to/Duets

From the melismatic longing of “Desert Rose” with Rai music singer Cheb Mami and sultry groove of “It’s Probably Me” with Eric Clapton to the uplifting 44/876 with Shaggy, which yielded his most recent and 17th GRAMMY award, Sting’s collaborations have become nothing short of cornerstones in the canon of popular music. To celebrate some of these joint-works, he has compiled a special collection to include some of his most beloved duets with collaborators such as Mary J. Blige, Herbie Hancock, Eric Clapton, Annie Lennox, Charles Aznavour, Mylène Farmer, Shaggy, Melody Gardot, Gashi and more. The Duets album will also include the brand new, never-before-released song, “September” with Italian icon Zucchero, produced by Sting himself and mixed by 4-time Grammy Award winner Robert Orton.  Full album track listing is included below. 

Duets was Executive Produced and A&R’d by Guénaël “GG” Geay & Martin Kierszenbaum with all songs mastered by Gene Grimaldi at Oasis Mastering, Los Angeles, United States.

Review from RIFF Magazine by Alexander Baechle

At 69 years of age and over 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, English musician Sting would appear to have a fair amount of pull in the music industry. A look at the guest performers on his new compilation album, Duets, confirms the distinctive vocalist’s tenured clout as a musician’s musician.

Duets covers roughly the past 20 years, exclusively focusing on Sting’s work with other major recording artists. During this period, hit songs were a rarity for Sting, but collaborations were frequent and fruitful. Duets nicely places more adventurous, obscure material alongside successful singles and unit shifters. Sting ventures into jazz, soul and international beats, highlighting lesser-known talents like Algerian raï artist Cheb Mami on “Desert Rose.” This sits alongside “Don’t Make Me Wait,” a song from his 2018 joint album with Shaggy, 44/876, a record which revitalized both artists’ sales.

It’s not within the scope of Duets to present a particular musical direction or storytelling arc. The anthology is certainly no concept album, nor does it attempt to work from a theorem or happenstance to explore a particular mood or atmosphere. Instead it offers a collection of carefully cultivated pop vocal performances. As such, the songs should be appreciated individually as singular works.

The record succeeds in emphasizing collaborative magic over star power. More under-the-radar artists like Melody Gardot and Mylène Farmer appear early in the running order, while heavy hitters like Annie Lennox and Shaggy emerge in the middle of the album. The songs on Duets cannot easily be categorized as belonging wholly to Sting. Each takes on a life of its own, and infuses the character of its guest performer.

This emphasis on channeling charismatic and lionized performers of the past half-century brings real joy to the proceedings. Highlight “None Of Us Are Free” boasts a powerful vocal from the legendary Sam Moore of Sam & Dave fame. The weary but determined blues vibe of the song also provides a reprieve from the collection’s tendency toward driving, modern beats.

Similarly, the undeniable Mary J. Blige oozes exuberance on “Whenever I Say Your Name.” Both Blige and Sting take the opportunity to play to their strengths. Sting begins the tune with a characteristically moody, subtle verse. Imperceptibly, the song morphs into a borderline funk romp, pushing Blige’s power vocals to the fore.

Though vocalists are emphasized, a handful of guests make their contributions instrumentally. Jazz trumpeter Chris Botti pops up on the closing track. Sting dusts off show-tune “My Funny Valentine” with a tasteful contribution from one of the greats, Herbie Hancock. On the smoky “It’s Probably Me,” a duet for voice and electric guitar, rock legend Eric Clapton appears providing restrained blues licks and evocative phrasings. Nominated for a Grammy in 1993, “It’s Probably Me” perfectly captures Sting’s bourgeois-hippie appeal. Baroque scales and acoustic instruments echo like a chamber performance at some shadowy vineyard.

Elsewhere, Sting makes songs better by hanging back to swell the progress. Sleeper “Practical Arrangement” works well as a film-musical plot piece. Guest vocalist Jo Lawry channels the hard-won convictions of the female lead. Through back and forth conversational lyrics, Lawry and Sting highlight the difficulty of embarking on a mutually committed journey. Sting’s character asks for responsibility and trust, but is rebuked with penetrating questions. Yet Lawry’s believable treatment of appropriate boundary-setting still carries enough warmth to hint at redemption.

Such organic pithiness underpins the majority of Duets’ songs and performances. At a certain point, or for certain listeners, it’s not enough to save the record from its glistening production value. Though no less than we’d expect from Sting at this point, a few songs come across as hookless and overproduced. Sterile dance beats creep in where they aren’t particularly needed.

The strangely cold “September,” for example, wavers between pastoral musing and dance-floor pep. Continental bluesman Zucchero matches the timbre of Sting’s voice in Italian, but a viscous under-beat recurs to interrupt the pretty daydream. “Reste,” with GIMS, feels like a mismatch of vocalists and styles. “Rise And Fall” verges on the painful—Craig David’s cloying, overly busy vocals detract from the aching classical guitar hook borrowed from Ten Summoner’s Tales’ superior song, “Shape Of My Heart.”

However, on the whole, Duets portrays Sting as a conduit for passionate performances. On many of the songs, his contribution is understated and uncertain, serving to push the featured artist forward. Yet the fact that each song is of such polished and refined quality speaks to Sting’s subtle knack for engineering holistic, arty pop songs. Though he sacrifices some amount of the spotlight, the songs, the artists and listeners benefit.

Review from The Independent by Rachel Brodsky

Compilation album is a generous reminder of The Police star’s incalculable range.

“Sting and Shaggy Know You’re Confused” read a headline in Forbes when the former Police frontman and reggae mainstay released a collaborative album 44/876, in 2018. From a bird’s-eye view, the pair’s collaboration seemed unlikely, with Sting and The Police being at the forefront of Britain’s 1980s new wave movement and Shaggy being synonymous with a 2000s single about denying infidelity. And yet, anyone intimately familiar with Sting - both as a solo artist and leader of The Police - knows of his decades-long history melding sounds, dabbling in everything from rock to jazz, new-age, the West African raï genre, classical, reggae - the list goes on.

Now, all of Sting‘s decade-spanning collaborations, starting from the early 1990s and up to the present, have been placed together in a wonderful compilation, simply titled Duets, featuring recordings with Mary J. Blige (“Whenever I Say Your Name”), Herbie Hancock (“My Funny Valentine”), Eric Clapton (“It’s Probably Me”), Annie Lennox (“We’ll Be Together”), Charles Aznavour (“L’amour C’est COmme Un Jour”), Mylène Farmer (“Stolen Car”), Shaggy (“Don’t Make Me Wait”), Melody Gardot (“Little Something”), Cheb Mami (“Desert Rose”), and more.

It’s a welcome opportunity to revisit Sting‘s lengthy collaborative resume; if anything, Duets serves as a reminder that not only has the man been doing this for a long time, but when he does team up with a new artist, he strikes just the right balance in letting the featured player shine, and letting the song belong to them as well.

It is generally known that Sting likes to collaborate with artists from all over the map, literally and from a genre perspective. But the point is driven home on Duets and should clear up any so-called “confusion” casual listeners might have the next time he drops a joint effort.

Review from Glide magazine by Victor Vargas

Sting Showcases Dynamic Range Via Collaborations On ‘Duets’.

With his fifteenth solo album, Sting’s Duets is a fluid journey between other collaborators with touches of inspiration from a plethora of genres, all while boasting that finesse and swagger that’s immortalized in his past work.

The collection opens up with a strong three-punch of songs with Melody Gardot, Eric Clapton, and Mylène Farmer. The opener, “Little Something,” with Gardot sets the tone for the project with a quarantine-recorded song that’s fun and beaming with a suave melody. Its bright and uplifting sound is something that is mirrored with the chemistry boasted by the two on the track.

As the project continues on, Sting moves to sample some of his own work on the album’s fifth track with Craig David. It samples his own fingerpicking from 1993’s “Shape Of My Heart”. Repurposing older works and reliving older songs via covers are what make Duets an album that will speak to fans of Sting’s earliest solo work and fans of The Police. Its merit lay in how these songs are able to explore the collaborative efforts between all sorts of artists from different generations and backgrounds. This idea is echoed on “Desert Rose” with Cheb Mami or “Fragile” with Julio Iglesias.

In keeping with the duet nature of the album, songs with other notable figures emerge such as the celebrated “Reste” with GIMS, or “Don’t Me Wait” with Shaggy. The latter having originally appeared on 2018’s joint project with Shaggy, renews the notion that this album is a collection of great collaborations and cannot be treated as a cohesive body of work.

This collection of tracks that crosses genres and languages is the heart of Duets. Whether it’s covers, rejuvenating his older works, or bringing someone from a different language onto the track, Duets is a space where the music is about having fun and sounding good.

Review from Clash magazine by Emma Harrison

A solid return from the songwriting legend...

With one of the most impressive bodies of work both as a solo artist and as front man of The Police and with over seven million (!) monthly listeners on Spotify, Sting continues to demonstrate his musical acumen and clout as one of the UK’s top male vocalists and songwriters.

'Duets' takes a retrospective and reflective look at his work collaborating with other guest artists over the last twenty years featuring the likes of Eric Clapton, Annie Lennox, Herbie Hancock, Mary J. Blige and Shaggy amongst others. Sting has never shied away from creative diversity, spanning different genres, and showcasing artists who wouldn’t necessarily have a platform for a more traditional mainstream audience such as a lesser-known talent like Algerian raï artist Cheb Mami.

A handful of guests make their contributions instrumentally such as jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on ‘In 'The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning’ and Herbie Hancock lends his incredible keys to a heart- warming interpretation of the show tune ‘My Funny Valentine’.

Each track needs to be appreciated individually as a singular piece of work that takes on a life of its own and embodies the character of its guest performer. One of the highlights must be ‘Rise & Fall’ with the fantastic Craig David which was originally released in 2002 featuring a sample of Sting’s 1993 track ‘Shape Of My Heart’. The bluesy Grammy award winning sultry groove ‘It’s Probably Me’, with rock legend Eric Clapton is also a standout track.

There are new additions to his collection which were recorded remotely in lockdown such as ‘September’ where he collaborates with Italian singing icon Zucchero, and ‘Little Something’ with Melody Gardot which was released in 2020.

Spanning an array of genres including worldbeat, jazz, classical, blues, rock and new-age, 'Duets' is an solid collection from one of the UK’s most prolific singer-songwriters.

Review from Cryptic Rock by Michele Johnson

Bass guitar god and Rock music staple Sting, AKA Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, has dabbled in Blues, Jazz, Spanish Flamenco, and even Broadway over the years. In the late ‘70s, he took the world by storm with the Police, lasting into the mid 1980s and continuing to reunite once every blue moon.

Towards the end of the band, he sought to go his own way with the release of The Dream of the Blue Turtles in 1985, and created buzz with his first single, “Fortress Around Your Heart.” Success continued with … Nothing Like the Sun (1986), then he embraced a Spanish guitar/’90s Rock influence with Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993), took a millennial turn in Brand New Day (1999), and went on to offer up so many other classics, including a Broadway composed The Last Ship in 2013. With his most recent release of My Songs in 2019, Sting fans were, and always will be, dying to hear more.

With such an expansive catalogue to go through, Sting compiled his best duets for his album of the same title, which was released on Cherrytree Records on Friday, March 19, 2021. Duets highlights his ability as an artist to be open-minded and work with people of all genres and ages; from every country possible, from France to Africa. Sting is a renaissance man of music and Duets is here to remind us of that.

Opener and classic track, “Little Something,” is a jazzy collab with New Jersey native Melody Gardot. A head bopper that gives off sultry, acoustic vibes, it draws some Flamenco influence, as well. Then “It’s Probably Me,” from Ten Summoner’s Tales, displays the work of guitar god Eric Clapton.  Showing Sting’s versatility, “Stolen Car” features French-Canadian enchantress Mylene Farmer and takes more of a Pop spin, creating an underground club atmosphere, musically speaking.

As we already know, Sting took a beautiful new musical direction on “Brand New Day,” the song and the album, much in thanks to Algerian singer Cheb Mam. With Middle Eastern style singing and stunning instrumentation, he creates a sensual feel along with an easily danceable beat. And it comes from a truly standout album in his career! Next, in another stylistic turn of events, he duets with British R&B crooner Craig David, intertwining his acoustic hook for “Shape of My Heart” to make David’s soul-searching single “Rise and Fall.” The result places a totally different spin on his music vibrancy.

The incomparable Mary J. Blige gives her soul on “Whenever I Say Your Name,” from 2013’s Sacred Love, and it’s worth praise as lofty as its background vocals. Another artist who needs no introduction, Shaggy gives off his signature Jamaican flare on “Don’t Make Me Wait,” from 2018’s 44/876. A jam of a love plea, it contrasts beautifully with the sadness and obsession of “Reste,” which features French-Congolese Hip-Hop artist GIMS and shows that Sting can keep up with the times while still providing a great hook.

A flashback to Sting’s early career, his collaboration with Annie Lennox and their song “We’ll Be Together,” from his debut, creates a funky beat and uses Lennox’s voice to create a beautifully drawn contrast while sounding like a good time. Then, “L’Amour C’est Comme Un Jour” (Love is Like a Day) with French-Armenian singer/songwriter/diplomat Charles Aznavour takes more of a classic approach with Sting singing in delicate French for the first time on the record. Meanwhile, “My Funny Valentine,” with Pianist Herbie Hancock, could easily be heard at any Jazz club, and yet Sting chooses to put his own spin on the classic without taking too much away from its original beauty. All of this before Julio Iglesias takes his own approach to Sting’s Spanish guitar classic “Fragile,” and Sting takes to it with subtlety, allowing Iglesias to have the spotlight.

In recent collaborations, Brooklyn Pop/Hip Hop artist GASHI collaborates on the single “Mama,” again proving that Sting is still being heard by newer generations in unexpected ways, and with danceable beats to boot. In fact, just for the Duets record he released a single called “September” with Italian Singer-Songwriter Zucchero. It is a song that harkens back to Sting’s musical career in the 1990s, having simple, beautifully delicate instrumentation.

He continues this lovely minimalism with “Practical Arrangement,” originally from The Last Ship. Featuring Australian Singer-Songwriter Jo Lawry, the Broadway-ready track intertwines a Jazz influence with Sting’s beautiful falsetto. But he takes a soulful turn when he is joined by R&B great Sam Moore and percussion great Sheila E on “None of Us Are Free.” Using Blues’ lyrical patterns, it relays a feel of great  inner grit and turmoil. Then, closing track “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” with Jazz great Chris Botti, sees the pair of artists playing calmly and cooperatively with one another. A Jazz fan’s dream, it also features some Pop elements, as well as orchestration, creating a well-rounded presentation.

In short, Sting has proven countless times that he is a musician’s musician when it comes to collaborations. Celebrating countless styles, he has never stuck within a particular schtick, working with current artists, as we have seen with GIMS and GASHI, and even Steve Aoki, who is shamefully not on this album. Due to this eclecticism Duets has something for everyone, young and old. Coming from someone of the millennial generation, he can still be truly appreciated for his open-mindedness and he has the catalogue to back that up. His forays into Jazz, Hip Hop, and Classical, among many other genres, prove his talent and versatility. For this, Cryptic Rock gives Sting’s Duets 4 out of 5 stars.

Review from GuitarsExchange by Paul Rigg

Two’s Company 

Sting is musically restless in the same way that Elvis Costello is; having emerged as leaders of hugely successful new wave bands in the later 1970s they both established strong solo careers and then leveraged their status to make collaborations and explore vastly different styles.   

Now approaching 70, Sting’s 15th solo album, Duets (19 March, 2021; A&M/Polydor) confirms that the Police frontman’s journey has been an extraordinary one. Perhaps because of the Police’s reggae infused sound it was not so unexpected that the singer collaborated with Shaggy on the album 44/876, which went on to win a Grammy for Best Reggae Album in 2019. However as this compilation record confirms this is just one genre that the 17-time Grammy winner has explored, as Duets contains elements of rock, jazz, new-age, worldbeat, classical, soul and – how not? - West African raï.   
    

Produced by Sting, Guénaël “GG” Geay and Martin Kierszenbaum, Sting’s work on Duets is extraordinary because he gives each collaborating artist space to be themselves and, in some ways, even lead the development of the song. Sometimes the Englishman simply adds a vocal, while on many others he contributes with his acoustic guitar, perhaps choosing from his Martin Ditson, Martin 5-18 Terz G, Gibson or Chet Atkins CE.  

It would be pointless to try to seek coherence in this album beyond Sting’s unifying presence; it’s diversity is what makes it stand out.   

The collection begins with the pop and flamenco-tinged Little Something, with Sting and Melody Gardot collaborating on an upbeat but soothing melody. Eric Clapton’s restrained contribution on the bluesy It’s Probably Me, which was nominated for a Grammy in 1993, is one of the album highlights, before the less familiar name of Mylène Farmer makes an appearance by joining a heavily-bearded Sting on Stolen Car.     
    

Collaborations with Craig David (Rise & Fall), Herbie Hancock (My Funny Valentine), Annie Lennox (We'll Be Together) and Julio Iglesias (Fragile) emerge around the middle of the album but it is his songs with Shaggy and Algerian artist Cheb Mami that really sparkle here. Don’t Make Me Wait is taken from the former’s 2018 album, 44/876, while Desert Rose brought raï music into the mainstream.    

Three songs further highlight the album’s diversity in this middle section, with Sting introducing other languages into the mix with Charles Aznavour’s L'amour C'est Comme Un Jour and Italian icon Zucchero’s September. The third curveball here is undoutedly his pairing with Mary J. Blige, who funks things up on Whenever I Say Your Name.   
    

As the album draws to a close, another gem appears in the shape of the blues-driven None Of Us Are Free, with vocal accompaniment provided by the legendary Sam Moore, of Sam & Dave renown. The final track is In The Wee Small Hours, with a warm and sultry contribution by jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, which makes you feel like you are lost in a New York bar at 3am, somewhat the worse for wear.   

In this way Duets dances around the globe, radically shifting moods and musical styles as it goes. Sting pulls off the considerable achievement of being very present on each cut but never imposing himself, which means that the featured artist is allowed to shine and bring their unique characteristics to the table. As the saying goes, Two’s Company – and for Sting, on this album, that is the perfect number...