The musician Sting said "could do anything" – Far Out Magazine

For any ageing musician, keeping track of the changing times is always difficult. While great music may be released daily, it’s hard to take it seriously when you have plenty of your favourites from your youth to fall back on. Sting had always kept his ear close to the ground, and he knew that he had something special on his hands when he listened to Lady Gaga for the first time.
Before he had even hit it big, though, Sting was never afraid of sounding like he was musically educated. Since he had already picked up a degree and had been a teacher before he started playing gigs around the London club scene, it’s no shocker that his music was much more sophisticated than the traditional punk rock happening around the same time.
From the first few moments of The Police’s first album, Sting was already showing himself to be a well-oiled machine when it came to writing tracks. Outside of flirting with genres such as reggae and punk rock, Sting possessed an immaculate ear for melody, turning songs like ‘Roxanne’ into some of the biggest earworms of all time.
Once The Police decided to call it a day, Sting wasn’t going to just leave all of his musical upbringing behind. Throughout his solo career, the bassist would continue to expand on what he had already created, making pieces that fit in with the sounds of jazz and fusion, like on the album Dream of the Blue Turtles.
While Lady Gaga might sound like the polar opposite of what The Police were doing, she had also been around the block a couple of times before becoming ‘Mother Monster’. Studying at Julliard for music, Gaga had already been woodshedding her song ideas before coming up with her first major hit singles, each with the same pop smarts that came from legends of the 1980s.
That kind of attention to her craft wasn’t limited to just dance-pop. Across albums like Born This Way, Gaga practically took her audience on a journey through everything that makes her tick musically. One minute, there would be massive stuttering dance beats on works like ‘Judas’, Spanish-themed flamenco guitar on ‘Americano’, and all-out power ballads such as ‘You and I’ with Queen’s Brian May on guitar.
By the time Gaga set up a show in Las Vegas, Sting was impressed enough to join her onstage, performing ‘King of Pain’ with his signature bass guitar. After the gig wrapped up, Sting knew that what he had seen was from another fly-by-night pop star, saying, “I was blown away by Lada Gaga the other night. She really did it. That girl can do anything, and I’ve known her a long time, but this is another level.”
That creative ingenuity hasn’t stopped in the slightest since Gaga started. While albums like Chromatica may have been reminiscent of her early sound, she has remained fearless about where she goes next, carefully balancing her pop self with the oldies records she made with the late Tony Bennett. Musicians are never limited to just the genres they play, and for Sting, Lady Gaga is another musician out in the wild looking to try every style she can wrap herself around.

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