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It's a story set in an English town whose shipbuilding industry is in its last throes. The plot intertwines a love triangle, reckonings between fathers and sons and a labor uprising with crosscurrents of economics and faith. The songs bridge show tunes and British folk traditions.

"The Last Ship," a musical with its story and songs by Sting, is a work in progress, aiming for Broadway next year. For the songwriter, it marked the end of a long creative block. Making up characters and learning the mandates of musical theater allowed Sting to step outside his usual songwriting self - and the resulting productivity, he said, is making him "blissfully happy."

Now 61, Sting is trim enough to wear a tight T-shirt and can juggle touring with his band with the continuing rewrites of "The Last Ship," along with finishing an album of his own performances of songs he wrote for the musical.

Remembering his blocked spell, he said he was only "slightly uncomfortable" at first when he noticed, after finishing his 2003 album "Sacred Love," that he had stopped writing songs. The pensive songwriter who, as the leader of the Police and over a long solo career, had made ceaseless surveillance sound romantic with "Every Breath You Take," and had presented himself, partly in jest, as the "King of Pain," no longer wanted to look inward.

Sting said he had lost his "huge, burning desire to just put things on the page." He was not eager for "the navel-gazing and confessionals and self-obsession that goes on with songwriters."

For three years he immersed himself in the music of John Dowland, the English Renaissance composer and lutenist.

Then he returned to arenas with a 2007-8 reunion tour by the Police. "The songs stood up - still stand up - but it didn't stimulate me to want to write new songs for a three-piece rock band at all," he said.

He began thinking about his 1991 solo album, "The Soul Cages," written after his father died. It's an album full of reminiscences - and arguments - about life in his hometown, Wallsend, near Newcastle in England, where he grew up a block from a shipyard.

In "Island of Souls," the song that starts "The Soul Cages," were seeds of a longer story: of a shipbuilding father and a son with wider horizons, in a town where "a working man works till the industry dies." Sting mentioned the idea of creating a musical about shipbuilders to a Broadway producer, who encouraged him to try it. And that, said Sting, "opened up the floodgates because I wasn't in the way anymore."

"I was writing songs for other characters than me, other sensibilities than mine, a different viewpoint," he said. "And so all of that pent-up stuff, all of those crafts I'd developed as a songwriter, I was suddenly free to explore without much thinking, actually."

Sting was no stranger to musical theater. "If you scratch me I'm a bit of a show-tune queen," he said. Some of his earliest jobs as a musician were in pit bands in Newcastle, and in 1989 he was in a Broadway production of "The Threepenny Opera." He freely admitted to emulating Rodgers and Hammerstein in "The Last Ship." But the songs are also grounded in the traditions of his hometown.

"The Last Ship," Sting said, "gave me back my reason to write music." Beyond the next year set aside for work on the musical, he has no plans to resume his old introspection.

"I don't think I need to go down there again," he said quietly. "I don't want to. I'd rather write about other people. I've mined myself."

The New York Times

(China Daily 09/29/2013 page12)