Sting: The creative (and cold!) way he forced himself to finish lyrics for his new album

Sting’s new album, 57th and 9th, is his first rock record in more than a decade. Ironically, his manager setting a timeline actually fueled his artistic spirit.

The rocker told Larry Flick on Tuesday that, for once, he was held to a strict schedule to put out the album.

“Was there any part of you that wanted to rebel and say, ‘I am not doing this’?” Flick asked.

“Yes, at first,” the former Police frontman explained. “But then I realized the creative spark is something that’s very ephemeral, very mysterious, and in order to catch it, [it’s] like hunting an animal in the forest. You have to be very wily and you have to keep changing the way you do it. Your strategy has to keep changing. If you have the same strategy, you’ll never get it, so you have to try a different way. Putting yourself out of your comfort zone is one way of doing it.”

One way Sting thought outside the box? Literally standing outside.

“I’d get home late at night, I would force myself onto the terrace of my apartment in New York, in the freezing cold and I couldn’t come into the house until I finished a lyric,” he said. “And I wrote four songs like that in a weekend, just by tweaking the muse. See what I’m saying? You have to write yourself out of this problem.”

1 on 1 with Larry Flick airs weekdays at 3 p.m. ET on SiriusXM Entertainment Weekly Radio (Ch. 105).

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