Sting: I Miss You Kate
[purchase]
Near as I can tell, in the two years since Star Maker Machine opened for business, we've never posted two separate posts by the same artist in a single week. To post two consecutive posts by the same artist is just plain weird, a rarity in the blogosphere at large.
But I'm doing it anyway. Because this particular instrumental is hauntingly beautiful, and though its middle section contains a hint of the same jazz modality that underlies Dream of the Blue Turtles, and the first and last sections coincide audiographically with Sting's Contemporary Pop period, in many ways, this carefully constructed composition - a piano-led jazz ballad, with subtle bass and drums, and a swelling string section to support it all -sounds utterly nothing like Sting in any other guise.
I did a genuine double take when I first encountered the track, purely by accident, as a b-side to the CD single for All This Time, which I purchased upon its release in '91. For a long time, I Miss You Kate was a mainstay of my mixtape compilation catalog, and I still treasure its very existence. Fair warning, though: the other b-side on the single - an 8 minute live take of King of Pain, sans the other members of The Police - goes on a bit long.
