..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


Sting & Shaggy: 44/876

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: A&M Records
Released: 2018.04.20
Time:
 58:03
Category: Reggae, Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Sting, Martin Kierszenbaum, Dwayne "iLL Wayno" Shippy, Teflon, Shane Hoosong, Machine Gun Funk
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.sting.com
Appears with: Shaggy
Purchase date: 2018
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] 44/876 (Sting Orville Burrell Rohan Rankine Sheldon Lawrence Shaun Pizzonia Dwayne Shippy Martin Kierszenbaum) - 2:59
[2] - Morning Is Coming (Sting Burrell Rankine Pizzonia) - 3:11
[3] Waiting for the Break of Day (Sting Burrell Pizzonia Shippy) - 3:18
[4] Gotta Get Back My Baby (Sting Burrell Andre Fennell Sheldon M. Harris Kierszenbaum) - 2:56
[5] Don't Make Me Wait (Sting Burrell Ashante Reid Pizzonia Kameron Quintin Jones Kennard Garrett)) - 3:35
[6] Just One Lifetime (Sting Burrell Rankine Pizzonia Shane Hoosong)) - 3:30
[7] 22nd Street (Sting Burrell Rankine Pizzonia Andy Bassford) - 4:00
[8] Dreaming in the U.S.A. (Sting Burrell Rankine Dominic Miller Kierszenbaum) - 3:08
[9] Crooked Tree (Sting Kierszenbaum Burrell Pizzonia Shippy Hoosong) - 3:37
[10] To Love and Be Loved (Sting Burrell Rankine Pizzonia Daudi Henderson) - 3:29
[11] Sad Trombone (Sting Burrell Pizzonia Shippy) - 5:43
[12] Night Shift (Sting Eliot Sumner Burrell Reid Miller Kierszenbaum) - 3:26

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Sting - Bas Dessus, Bass, Producer, Background Vocals, Drums, Editing, Engineer, Guitar, Instrumentation, Keyboards, Mixing, Percussion, Sounds
Shaggy - Vocals

David Barnes - Horn
Andy Bassford - Guitar
Maggie Buckley - Flute, Saxophone
Kameron Corvet - Guitar, Producer
Shaun Darson - Drum Fills
Robert Dubwise - Guitar
Dwayne Shippy - Additional Production, Bass, Guitar, Instrumentation, Keyboards, Percussion, Producer, Sounds, String Arrangements, Background Vocals
Clark Gayton - Mastering, Trombone
Joel Gonzalez - Horn
Shane Hoosong - Additional Production, Drums, Keyboards, Percussion, Producer, Sounds
Zach Jones - Drums, Background Vocals
Geoffrey Keezer - Piano
Heather Kierszenbaum - Sounds
Martin Kierszenbaum - Additional Production, Back Cover Photo, Bass, Clavichord, Drums, Editing, Executive Producer, Fender Rhodes, Guitar, Keyboards, Organ, Percussion, Piano, Producer, Sounds, Synthesizer, Executive-Producer
Zachary Lucas - Horn
Machine Gun Funk - Drums, Keyboards, Producer
Branford Marsalis - Saxophone
Steven "Lenky" Marsden - Keyboards
Dominic Miller - Guitar
Salvador Ochoa - Cover Photo
Robert Orton - Engineer, Mixing, Percussion, Synthesizer
Dave Richards - Bass
Glenn Rogers - Guitar
Robbie Shakespeare - Bass
Robert Stringer - Horn
Eliot Sumner - Vocals
Teflon - Drums, Keyboards, Producer
Nicole VanGiesen - Photography
Liam Ward - Art Direction, Design
Karl Wright - Drums

Kamari Martin - Background Vocals
Melissa Musique - Background Vocals
Gene Noble - Background Vocals

Morgan Heritage -  Vocals, Background Vocals on [1]
Aidonia (Sheldon Lawrence)- Vocals on [1]

Kennard Garrett - Producer
Tony Lake - Engineer
Grant Valentine - Assistant Engineer
Gene Grimaldi - Mastering
Danny Quatrochi - Guitar Technician

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


44/876 is a collaborative album by English musician Sting and Jamaican musician Shaggy. It was released on April 20, 2018 by A&M Records, Interscope Records and Cherrytree Records. The album's title refers to the country calling code for the United Kingdom (+44) and the North American area code for Jamaica (876), Sting's and Shaggy's respective home countries. In the United Kingdom, 44/876 debuted at number nine on the UK Albums Chart with first-week sales of 7,658 units. It is Sting's first top 10-album since Sacred Love (2003), and Shaggy's first since Hot Shot (2001).



Sting spent the entirety of his career studiously avoiding the appearance of having a good time, which is why his 2018 collaboration with reggae star Shaggy seemed so odd: at the age of 66, the rock star decided it was finally time to crack a smile. 44/876 - a collaboration named after the phone codes for their respective home countries - is most certainly a party record, albeit one that cooks at a low simmer as it swings between fleet-footed reggae sunsplash tunes and mellow grooves. If Sting seems subservient to Shaggy, that makes sense. Shaggy specializes in doing one thing well, while Sting took it as a point of pride that he could do anything from jazz to symphonies. While 44/876 has a few AAA moments - "Waiting for the Break of Day" could've slid onto 2016's 57th & 9th without any incident, "22nd Street" oddly evokes memories of slick yacht-soul - it's firmly a modern reggae album filtered through the perspective of a pop star who knows how to spin this music into something appealing to a wider audience. Consequently, 44/876 can have its cutesy moments - such as the rampant Lewis Carroll references in "Just One Lifetime" - and it also puts a slick gloss over every element of its reggae, but this suits a collaboration that's fueled in part by the showbiz status of the two participants. Shaggy and Sting might not first appear to be an ideal match, but they're both rooted in reggae and are both international stars, so they share a vernacular that helps turn 44/876 into a surprisingly enjoyable pan-international pop album.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



The reggae-lite collaboration between Sting and Shaggy is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

Why Shaggy? Presumably, if Sting wanted to go 50/50 on a reggae album, he had options. Toots Hibbert is still in fine voice. The Wailers aren’t really the Wailers anymore, but Sting and the Wailers has a hell of a ring to it. And if he were looking to make a splash on the adult contemporary charts, Michael Franti probably could have made it happen. But Shaggy? Mr. Boombastic? The guy who sings like he’s auditioning to voice a breakfast cereal character? Why?

It turns out the two just really hit it off. Sting even refers to “my good friend Shaggy” early on the duo’s unlikely collaboration 44/876, and the album never leaves any doubt that Sting means it. Just look at them posing on those motorcycles, like your parents in their most embarrassing vacation photo. Even when the material falls flat, as it frequently does, there’s some pleasure in picturing these two entirely unobjectionable personalities living their best lives, knocking back Coronas while gently busting each other’s chops with the superficial banter of Liam Neeson and his middle-age golf buddies in the Taken films. It’s such an old-man record you can almost feel your testosterone drop listening to it.

44/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises. Does Sting feign a Caribbean accent? Yes, obviously. Does he fetishize white sandy beaches and honor the ghost of Bob Marley? You know he does. Are there air horns? Yup—all those boxes are checked right out the gate on the opening title track, another inglorious addition to the canon of reggae songs about how great reggae music is. “It shakes me to my soul with a positive vibration, I start dreaming of Jamaica,” Sting sings, standing out like a fanny-packed tourist against unexpectedly contemporary pop-dancehall production fit for a Sean Kingston album. The track’s modern sheen is a fake-out; the rest of the record is more UB40 than Top 40.

In a Rolling Stone profile, Shaggy makes a crack about women getting pregnant to the album’s steamy single “Don’t Make Me Wait,” but by and large the Shaggy here is a far less randy one than the “It Wasn’t Me” Shaggy at the turn of the century. He’s not as miscast as he sounds on paper. Nobody will mistake him for one of reggae’s greats, but he’s a game performer, down for whatever the album throws at him, be it dub, rocksteady, or yacht rock. His toasts color otherwise colorless songs without disrupting the tasteful romantic vibe Sting sets so carefully. And while there’s some initial absurdity in hearing him opposite Sting, one of the stateliest and most humorless of all of rock elder statesmen, the album never acknowledges it, not even on “Morning is Coming,” where Sting is awoken by to the serene song of a nightingale… that happens to share the severe nasally voice of Shaggy.

More often Sting is the one who sounds out of place. His voice has taken on a smoky hue that can work for him when he leans into it, especially on the jazzy, The Dream of the Blue Turtles-styled “Waiting for the Break of Day” or the torchy “Sad Trombone” (yes, that’s really the title, and no, it doesn’t get the reference). Yet every time he reaches for his higher registers he shows the limits of his range, inviting unflattering comparisons to his youthful heyday with the Police. There was a time when Sting legitimately could have nailed a designated reggae album, but his realistic window for that closed quite a while ago. Maybe that’s why so many of these songs, even the upbeat ones, dwell on missed opportunities and the passage of time.

The great irony of 44/876 is, despite its inherent disposability, it’s actually one of Sting’s more enjoyable albums, simply because he’s actually having fun here. At times, the album almost feels like Sting’s treat to himself, a reward for all those grief-stricken song cycles, symphonic works, and that one album with all the lute on it. After decades of treating music as a solemn obligation, he deserves a little vacation, and 44/876 is as close as any Sting album has ever come to sounding like one. The music’s usually pretty lame, but at least the company is nice.

Rating: 4.8 out of 5.0

Evan Rytlewski - April 25 2018
Pitchfork



Most of us discovered this puzzling pairing when they played at January’s Grammy awards. There was a justified kerfuffle at the privileging of two aged men, pop royals or not, over younger female talent. (Lorde, Cordelia to Shaggy’s Lear, was a chart-topping nominee, yet the Grammys exiled her.) Somehow, the duo escaped opprobrium and have consummated their musical bromance with this exasperatingly OK album.

Yes, there’s the fear that 90s Sting will manifest in his brow-furrowed, lizardly earnestness, but the opening title track (a reference to UK/Jamaica dialling codes) shows he’s in on the joke. Its tropical pop-reggae presents Sting – perhaps reclining in a country house, being brought a boiled egg by a butler – deciding to head for Shaggy’s Jamaican retreat, leaving boring old Britain and Brexit behind.

There, Sting’s deracinated, shapeshifting croon plays off perfectly against Shaggy’s supple toasting and soulful caw. Just One Lifetime in particular deftly mixes their talents, ranging from grit to gimmickry. Sting’s still a fearless, fascinating lyricist, and Shaggy’s attractive persona remains one wink short of a leer. 44/876 may be no more exciting than a well-made sofa, but only psychopaths don’t like sofas.

Damien Morris - 22 Apr 2018
© 2018 Guardian



Well, what a strange thing this is. True, there have been reggae elements to Sting’s music since he and The Police implored Roxanne not to put her on red light, but certainly eyebrows were raised when it was announced that he would release a pop-reggae record with Jamaica’s Mr. Bombastic, Shaggy. The pair were introduced by a mutual friend and the resulting lead single ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’, a sunny confection whose main hook evokes Bob Marley’s 1977 classic ‘Wait In Vain’, led to a blossoming friendship and this unexpectedly likeable album.

It would be easy – perhaps too easy – to snort with derision at the musical union of a novelty dancehall singer from the early noughties and a pensioner now largely famous for having tantric sex. Let’s have some fun with the most ill-judged elements of ‘44/876’, though, shall we? Yes: Tyne and Wear native Sting drifts into a Jamaican patois with genuinely unbelievable regularity – at one point he invokes “the gho-oast of Bo-ab Moah-arley” (maybe Bob cropped up to possess ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’), and at another refers to a woman as “the butt-ah on my toe-ast”). There is a track on which these world-famous musicians complain about working the ‘Night Shift’. ‘Sad Trombone’ winks at you from the tracklist.

And yet, and yet. There’s something weirdly enjoyable about this cheery abomination of an album. The camaraderie is palpable. These are staggeringly, beautifully unselfconscious men, insulated by success, and they have honestly no idea how ludicrous they look and sound. Take the languid ‘Crooked Tree’, on which Shaggy plays the role of the judge and Sting the accused man, protesting, “The circumstances of my birth were something short of bliss.” Their hearts are in the right place, even if their better judgment was sunning itself somewhere in Kingston.

‘44/867’ offers free love and compassion aplenty, the title name-checking the phone area codes of its amiable authors’ homelands. The pair told reggaeville.com that the album is a love letter to their adopted home, America. “We are both immigrants and we owe a great deal to this country,” Sting said. “It’s not [about] building walls or any of the other crap.” In some ways, this album is boundary-breaking: it batters through good taste, though its reggae-lite template is musically forgettable. Open your hearts to Sting and Shaggy, pop’s hapless unlikely lads.

Jordan Bassett - Apr 13, 2018
NME © Copyright Time Inc. (UK) Ltd.



Sting's last album, 57th & 9th, was a surprisingly straight-ahead, rock-oriented affair. Here, he pulls another detour, teaming up with Jamaican reggae-pop growler Shaggy. The sunny, nonchalant results often suggest Roxanne hitting a Sandals resort, trading her red dress for a string bikini and flip-flops.

Extending his bona fides, Sting evokes "the ghost of Bob Marley that haunts me to this day" on the buoyant title track, which, like everything on the album, is co-credited to Sting, Shaggy and their backing musicians. Indeed, "Morning Is Coming" approximates Marley's "Three Little Birds" and "Waiting for the Break of Day" does the same to "Wait in Vain."

While 44/876 appears to begin in Jamaica, it gradually hones in on the pair's mutual admiration for American life and culture. Beach Boys harmonies drive "Dreaming in the U.S.A.," and Sting revisits his inner Tin Pan Alley for the soggy "Sad Trombone" and "22nd Street," though Shaggy slyly undercuts the latter's sentimental journey with goofball lines like "To get your body was my goal/But you fit perfectly inna de wifey role." With Sting's familiar bass sound driving most tracks, and Shaggy's production partner Sting International (no relation) providing bounce and clarity, 44/876 contains much of the sizzle of classic reggae or dancehall, though a little more substance would've been welcome too.

Rating 3.5 out of 5

Richard Gehr - April 20, 2018
© Rolling Stone 2018



There is something about the combination of Sting and Shaggy that seems inherently ludicrous: Mr Boombastic Loverman meets Tantric Sex God in a pop/reggae pile up. These two swaggering old mononymous male stars seem to belong to different corners of the musical universe. Sting, 66, is rock royalty – a virtuoso musician and supreme singer-songwriter with intellectual pretensions, who dabbles in folk, classical and opera. Shaggy, 49, is an ebullient Jamaican toaster with a gritty voice and penchant for fruity innuendo.

At the suggestion of their shared management, Sting agreed to sing a hook on a Shaggy single, the sunny Don’t Make Me Wait, and the pair got on so well that the sessions expanded into a whole album of original songs.

The title track, 44/876 – named after the respective international dialling codes for Britain and Jamaica – commemorates their transatlantic friendship. Over a breezy Caribbean groove, Sting confesses that “the ghost of Bob Marley haunts me to this day”, while Shaggy adds enthusiastic interjections: “Big up the UK, man, yeah, bam bam!”

I’m tempted to say it is surprisingly good – yet why should we be surprised? They are both gifted, charismatic veteran musicians with very distinctive skills. The blend of Sting’s sweet, high tenor and top-tier songwriting with Shaggy’s earthy delivery and rhythmic bounce has an effortless appeal. Sting’s early success with the Police was rooted in reggae and it’s a flow that suits him well, even if his excruciating delivery of the phrase “positive vibration” is some of the dodgiest white patois heard since 10CC’s Dreadlock Holiday.

There’s a hefty dollop of cheese on poppier tracks. The way Sting drops in such lines as “as my good friend Shaggy says” brings to mind Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin hamming it up in Vegas. These kind of guest star combinations have become a feature of modern pop and it’s a nice reminder that the oldies can duet, too. The Shaggy-led Gotta Get Back My Baby is such a fantastically catchy pop song it is a pity it will most likely be relegated to the Radio 2 playlist. If Bruno Mars and Drake recorded the same track, there’d be no escaping it.

Musically, Sting does the heavy lifting, with Shaggy dipping in and out as wing man, proclaiming “biddy bong bong” as the mood takes him. But aside from the more obviously playful pop, there are songs with tough political and emotional edges. The brooding Waiting for the Break of Day puts Sting on a picket line: “When the laws are wicked / You’re forced to disobey.” Just One Lifetime twists Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter into a nursery rhyme for the apocalypse. While 22nd Street sounds like a lost Gershwin classic given a lover’s rock twist. Crooked Tree is a dark, narrative folk song, with Shaggy voicing a hanging judge, while Sting pleads for clemency. Sad Trombone is a noirish jazz ballad built around audaciously overblown musical similes and metaphors. These songs are strong enough to fit anywhere into Sting’s impressive canon, delivered with an energy and focus that keeps his tendency to over-elaborate at bay.

What I like most is the sense that these two musicians are beyond caring about perceptions, simply determined to have fun. 44/876 is a treat for grown-up fans of either artist. Biddy bong bong!

Neil McCormick - 20 April 2018
© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2018



“The ghost of Bob Marley haunts me to this day,” Sting sings at the start of 44/876. The title refers to the dialling codes for the UK and Jamaica. But it appears that the former Police frontman has got the wrong number. Rather than patching him through to Marley’s ghost, the album connects him to a less imposing figure from Jamaican musical history — “Mr Boombastic” himself, Shaggy.

They make for an unlikely duo, the exquisitely self-serious rock elder statesman and the maker of frivolous 1990s dancehall-pop hits. “Dreaming in the USA” is duly disastrous, a saccharine tribute to the American dream. But otherwise the album — made after the pair joined up for a one-off single — defies expectations.

The title track sets Shaggy’s patois chants and Sting’s earnest fluting tones to smoothly melodic tropical pop: they prove a simpatico fit. “Just One Lifetime” frames Sting’s crooned choruses with traditional reggae while “22nd Street” has a dreamy jazz guitar part flitting around the bassline. The production has depth and balance, giving a solid grounding to the incongruous pairing. “I know what works for me,” Sting sings. He can add this entertaining mismatched-buddy story to the list.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney - April 20, 2018
© Copyright The Financial Times
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!