Sting’s Return to the Power Trio Format Soars in L.A: Concert Review

Welcome back, Sting +2 … or, in the parlance of the current tour, “Sting 3.0.” Power trios are a thing, and roughly four decades after he was last officially a regular, ongoing member of one, Sting has come back around to seeing the glory of the maxim that triads are rad. (Sorry, we actually just coined that.)

Sting is joined on this year-long-plus outing (which began in September and has dates booked through October 2025) by his guitarist of the last 35 years, Dominic Miller, and a not-nearly-so-longstanding drummer, Chris Maas. And that’s it. And with no insult intended to the extra battalions of brilliant players who have joined him on other tours over the years to say, not only they are not missed at the moment, but it’s greatly to the audience’s benefit that Sting has saved on labor costs this time around.

This is as close as we could likely come to getting a Police reunion tour in 2024-25. It’s not as optimal in some certain regards, obviously, as Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers are far from completely replaceable on the early band material that takes up a decent portion of the setlist. But it’s more optimal in others, in that (unlike the actual Police reunion tour of 2008), it includes a wealth of selections from the nearly 40 years’ worth of solo records he’s put out since then — performed as if he’d recorded them with the Police.

Plus, he’s probably in a much better, more engaged and generous mood than he’d be on a reunion tour, and certainly playing in more intimate venues than in that imaginary scenario. The “Sting 3.0” tour will hit bigger venues next year, including some co-headlining dates with Billy Joel. But the scenario for fall 2024 has been to play small-to-mid-size theaters, sometimes for enough nights that the engagements nearly count as a Las Vegas-style mini-residency. That has been the case with his five-night stand at L.A.’s Wiltern, which wraps up with a show Sunday evening, his last one till January. It’s worth trying to catch a last-minute ticket, if one avails: He may never have done a more satisfying solo tour.

At the show we caught midway through the L.A. stand, Sting used the phrase “muscle memory” at one point — in the service of mentioning that a song he hadn’t played since trotting it out on tour last year (“I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying”) had easily come back to him after all. That term felt like it actually applied in a number of loose senses here. Whatever the intellectualized equivalent of muscle memory might be was evident from the start, as the three players stood in an old-fashioned triangle configuration, with Sting not at center stage but stage left. (Maybe that was residual from all those years of feeling like there’d be trouble if he blocked the crowd’s view of Copeland all night.) He had a wireless head mic, and so was free to — and occasionally did — move to the middle, or even change sides of the stage with Miller. But the basic setup emphasized just how much the star wanted to emphasize a kind of minimalist equality among players, even if no one will mistake this for a democracy.

And muscularity was indeed the buzzword for the night… not just because Sting has obviously kept up the yoga and appears to have not an ounce of body fat at 73. Leanness in a lineup doesn’t have to mean any sacrifice in fullness; “stripped down” might be a phrase somebody would use in a review, but it’s not something an audience member would be thinking in the moment. Watching this three-piece proceed through its paces was enough to make you wonder afresh why the power trio continues to be the exception and not the norm in rock ‘n’ roll, even though a good number of the most celebrated bands in classic-rock history fit that format. (Think not just Cream, Nirvana and the Jimi Hendrix Experience but bands that have a non-playing singer like the Who and U2.)

Maybe some current or future band leaders out there will see a show on this tour and find the inspiration they’ve needed to… fire an extraneous member? Jk.

Although it’s unlikely that Sting regrets any of the years he spent elevating side players as elevatible as Branford Marsalis, he sure seems like he’s getting a kick out of boosting himself back into the position of being an obvious lead instrumentalist on the bass. That’s not to say that he doesn’t fill the two-hour time slot he’s afforded himself each night with a good amount of his gentler material — including a closing encore number, “Fragile,” that marks the one time of the night he picks up an acoustic guitar instead of the electric bass. But it seems entirely possibly he is enjoying doing his hardest-rocking solo tour to date as much as the audience is. That’s clear just from the single he put out in September, apparently as kind of a one-off tour teaser, “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart).” He introduced it at the Wiltern as “romantic, but loud,” and indeed, its fast-paced simplicity marks it as maybe the closest thing to garage-rock he will ever do.

It’s a crowd-pleaser of a show, to say the least — with some songs that his steadier fans could probably do without hearing again, like “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” but at today’s concert prices, he likely doesn’t want any first-timers to leave cheated, so there it is, out of the way early in the show. Other songs are as much in demand but offer greater rewards in the live setting, like “Walking on the Moon,” with its still potent lunar-reggae groove, and the sound of Sting holding out notes and then staring down the audience, daring anyone not to be impressed with his breath control. “So Lonely” is another live standout from back in the day, getting loose and jammier in the middle, emblematic of a whole show that finds its more casual mid-sections expanding to affect the feel of what comes before and after, too.

There are a lot of song intros that might bear a residual effect from the “My Songs” catalog-remake album and tour that Sting did not too man years back… but only a slight one. For the first two-thirds of the show, the rocking out was punctuated by mini-“VH1 Storytellers” moments, in which Sting would set up the song with 30-45 seconds of discourse about the writing or subject — just enough to give the veteran attendee something extra to chew on, and stopping well short of anyone’s boredom threshold. Hence, we learned that the agnostic performer was inspired by 2 Samuel 11:26-27 for “Mad About You” (he could have just said “David and Bathsheba,” but citing verses is more fun), or that he wrote “I Burn for You” about an obsessive love as a schoolteacher while making his class take a pop quiz, or that “Fields of Gold” is about the barley growing outside his house. (“I have a little house in the English countryside. Well, it’s more of a castle really…” Yes, he further established, he is Stonehenge-adjacent.)

He’s also into alerting us to time signatures, as before “Seven Days”… which left him complimenting the crowd after doing it on Wednesday: “Clapping in 5/4 time — I’m impressed!” (Maybe he says that to all the crowds.)

The singer did alert the crowd early on that he would not “say anything about the election, because I’m British,” although the attuned audience did put in a big cheer for the “lost… faith in politicians” in “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” Any assent for the “Men go crazy in congregations / They only get better one by one” in “All This Time” was quieter.

Needless to say, “Russians” is not coming back into Sting’s set soon, or probably ever. But while Sting didn’t break his no-political-speech rule, it was hard not to also feel it during the closer “Fragile,” even if he’s been wrapping up his encores with that for years. With the years advancing and times arguably growing darker, some of us have never felt the fragility more — but that may also be one more reason why a show otherwise as completely un-delicate and hard-rocking as this one feels so good right now.

(After a break, Sting resumes with U.S. shows in January in Phoenix and Sacramento, then heads to Central and South America before returning to North America with a Red Rocks two-night stand in May.)

Setlist for Sting at the Wiltern, Nov. 13, 2024:

Message in a Bottle
If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
Englishman in New York
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Fields of Gold
Never Coming Home
Mad About You
Seven Days
Why Should I Cry for You?
All This Time
I Burn for You
Driven to Tears
Fortress Around Your Heart
I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying
Can’t Stand Losing You/Regatta de Blanc
Shape of My Heart
I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)
Walking on the Moon
So Lonely
Desert Rose
King of Pain
Every Breath You Take
[encore]
Roxanne/Be Still My Beating Heart
Fragile