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NEW YORK, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- Rock legend Sting says he discovers something new each time he plays his hits during concerts. "My job every night is to see the song evolve," the Grammy-winning artist told reporters in a recent virtual press conference to promote Great Performances: Message in a Bottle, a PBS dance special set to his music and premiering Friday.
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"I'm not there just to reproduce something that was recorded decades ago," the 72-year-old "Roxanne" and "Fields of Gold" singer added. "I'm there to discover something new, and I'm still in that process of discovery. I'm still a student of music."
The musician, who said he sings and practices guitar every day, added that one can never truly get to the end of music theory.
"So, that's a wonderful, endless journey that I'm on," Sting said. "I want to get better as a songwriter, as a composer. Even at my age, it's still my journey."
He sees a vague connection between his brief career as a schoolteacher in the 1970s and how he has since influenced generations of musicians.
"I taught for two or three years, and I realized very quickly that teaching is not what takes place in a classroom. It's actually learning. You're there to show enthusiasm for something -- a poem, or a painting or an equation," he said.
"You just have to show your love and enthusiasm for knowledge. That's what it is, and then 10 people learn. Teaching is something that pedagogues do. I was never a pedagogue.
"I was just enthusiastic, and I suppose that's what I do onstage. I infuse the work with my own energy, my own curiosity, my own passion, and that seems to be working."
Above all else, he considers himself a storyteller.
"I write songs to, first of all, amuse myself, keep myself and my brain occupied," Sting said.
"I like to use the song form as a storytelling medium. It's quite a difficult discipline. You have to get it within a certain span of time, a certain number of verses, so you can't be too long-winded about it."
He is proud to be a part of the Message in a Bottle special because Kate Prince's choreography repackages his hits to tell the story of an immigrant family in a new way he hadn't imagined.
"The great things about this dance piece is that they've woven my songs into a sort of meta-narrative, which also reflects my own feeling about the world and this crisis that we're all facing," Sting said.
"I'm very grateful to Kate for doing that. It's a wonderful piece of work," he added. "I never anticipated this when I was writing these songs, that they could be interpreted in this manner so successfully."
Even after decades in the spotlight, Sting admitted he still gets slightly nervous when he steps out on a stadium stage to entertain thousands of screaming fans.
"You walk out in front of 10,000 people, 20,000 people, who all seem to be happy to see you, [and] that definitely gives you a shot in the arm even if you might feel a little bit out of it just before the show," he said.
"Walking on stage is a terrific blast of energy."
With a nod to the PBS program's title, Sting said "Message in a Bottle" is a plea for human connection in 2023.
"All of us could be in those boats with our families, if we were in danger. And I think migration is something that human beings have done for millennia," he said.
"When there's a drought, when there's a famine, when there's a war, we move somewhere else and the city/states are quite a recent invention in humanity," he added.
"None of us know what the answer is. We all have to recognize that we're all in the same boat."
