About fifteen minutes into Sting’s recent appearance at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, I thought to myself, “Man, for a guy who must be in his sixties, Sting looks great.” I then happened to glance to my left, where one of my fellow concert attendees had their phone out — because they clearly had been thinking along the same lines — except I could see in big bold text on their screen: 73 years old.
Age ain’t nothing but a number when it comes to the English-born musical icon, formerly of The Police and now entirely himself. And Sting didn’t need to do much to command the stage; wearing a T-shirt and jeans that fit his slim yet powerful frame perfectly, he looked as fresh and healthy and engaged as any twenty-something rocker.
The revelation of just how old he is came as a shock, but a delightful one. All the jokes about Sting’s very possible immortality are obvious, from deals with the devil to haunted portraits in the attic to the very provable benefits of eating vegetarian and exercising regularly. (You can also throw in some comments about tantra, while you’re at it.) But watching him on stage that night, it felt like that was the real secret — being a musician, playing his bass and guitar for a crowd that genuinely loves his music.
Sting 3.0 delivered all the hits you’d hope to hear at a Sting concert, including a little trip into his “cowboy phase” (as Krysta, my friend/plus-one that night, put it) with the 1996 track “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying.” He also went back in time with the first song he ever wrote — “I Burn for You,” which he first recorded with the band Last Exit in the 1970s. The track sounded as fresh and original as “Desert Rose,” released in 1999, despite the difference in decades and “Desert Rose”‘s world music influences.
Performing just over a week after Election Day 2024, Sting avoided being too political with his on-stage banter, even though the crowd was more than game to find their own meaning in the lyrics; during the second song of the night, “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” people had a strong reaction to the lyric “You could say I’d lost my belief in our politicians.”
Sting didn’t feed that, though — in fact, after rocking through his first four songs, he full-out told the audience that “I’m not going to talk about the election.” From the back of the theater, an audience member yelled that he should, but instead Sting went on to talk about his house — “more of a castle, really” — and how it’s surrounded by fields of wheat, which look golden in the sunlight… You can guess where things went next.
Sting, photo by Pooneh Ghana
Sting sat down on a stool for “Fields of Gold” and a few songs afterward, but was quickly back on his feet, as revved up as before. Perhaps key to Sting’s energy on stage is the spontaneity baked into the show — the opportunities to flex and explore and improv. It’s not just playing the hits for him — towards the end of “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” the second song of the night, he and guitarist Dominic Miller gloried in deconstructing the song into a series of extended riffs, before closing out with a bang.
Additionally, there’s a portion of the Sting 3.0 show where Sting turns to Miller to pick what they’ll play next for a few songs, choices that seem designed to catch Sting by surprise: When Consequence’s own Spencer Kaufman saw Sting in Port Chester, New York last month, Miller picked the songs “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “Can’t Stand Losing You.”
In Los Angeles a month later, Miller selected “It’s Probably Me,” which Sting originally wrote for the Lethal Weapon 3 soundtrack. (If you are not familiar with the latter song, it definitely sounds like the perfect background music for a scene in which Mel Gibson tries to seduce a suspect.)
Sting closed out the night with “Every Breath You Take,” followed by a hard-rocking encore of “Roxanne” and a much softer, introspective rendition of “Fragile.” It was the same set of songs he’s used to conclude past tour stops — by design, he told the crowd: He wanted to “end with something quiet and thoughtful so you leave here quiet and thoughtful.” It was a choice that spoke to Sting’s passion for yoga, the concert equivalent of Shavasana. Of course one of the world’s most famous yoga practitioners would choose to end his concert on a similar note.
Seeing Sting perform live feels like hardcore scientific validation of the way he’s spent the last seven decades of his life — that, through some combination of clean living and full commitment to his craft, he’s stumbled somehow across the secret to immortality. This is, of course, an exaggeration; even Sting is made of mortal flesh, kept alive by muscles and organs that all have expiration dates. Just like the rest of us. But just because science is real doesn’t mean magic isn’t, at least when it comes to Sting. And as long as he keeps breathing, I’m going to choose to believe.
See photos from Sting’s show at the Capitol Theatre below.
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