“…YOU COULD BE ME IN OTHER LIFE”: LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC ASPECTS OF BUILDING SPEAKER IMAGES IN STING’S ALBUM “BRAND NEW DAY”

Abstract

The authors of the article, based on the method of close reading, investigated the
linguistic and stylistic means to create the image of a speaker / narrator in the album “Brand
New Day” (1999) by Sting, regarding his manner to carry out a well-structured storyline
through a poem. Evidently, each of ten songs composing the album represents a special type
of a narrator. Starting from “A Thousand Years”, whose Bach-mannered leading motif is
harmonized with the lyrics about a love so strong that it could penetrate time, the writer’s
creative thinking develops to the fairy-tale plots of “Desert Rose” and “After the Rain Has
Fallen” with whirling Oriental grooves and exotic arrangements. These two songs, in turn,
serve as a frame for the ‘off-kilter’ bossa-nova “Big Lie Small World”, a vignette sketch on
the topic of lies and repentance, with a letter for a key symbol. Furthermore, three songs
exploiting purely theatrical masks for narrators (a dog in “Perfect Love… Gone Wrong”, a
male transvestite in “Tomorrow We’ll See”, and a “self-made man” in “Fill Her Up”) lead to
revelation of the profound “human comedy” in the closing track eponymous to the entire
album – “Brand New Day”. Overall, it was seen that, although the narrator types appear to
be diverse in all songs, they are nonetheless united by the idea of changes, including
reincarnation, which is so typical for any fin de siècle culture.