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

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.