How ‘Roxanne’ changed Sting’s life and more stories from his back catalog : World Cafe Words and Music Podcast

In every musician’s career, there are the songs that stand out among the rest. Perhaps it’s a song that changed everything for them, the song they grew to love, or the song that was the hardest to write.

Those are the songs we want to learn more about on a new World Cafe feature called Backtracking. The premise is simple: We’ll give artists a long list of prompts they can choose from. Then, they’ll look back through their catalog and pick the song that fits best. They’ll tell us the stories behind them and perform them live.

In our latest installment, Sting joins us to talk about the song that he still loves performing and how he performs it when he’s played it a million times.

“My job is to perform a song that I may have written 40 years ago with the same energy, same curiosity, same passion, as if I had just written it this afternoon,” he says.

Sting also talks about the song that changed his life, which happens to be the same song that earned him a pretty impressive distinction:

“I am probably the world’s most successful butt pianist,” he says.

Find out what song Sting plays butt piano in on this all new episode of Backtracking.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.