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You look at the photos on all the Police albums, and none of you are ever smiling.

Because we were miserable! [laughs] I wasn't very happy. I was obviously happy in some moments. Playing and singing I was happy, but gradually the band became a kind of prison for me, and I needed to start again. I wanted the freshness and excitement of a new beginning. Even though logic would say, "Are you out of your mind? You're in the biggest band in the world -- just bite the bullet and make some money." But there continued to be some instinct, against logic, against good advice, [that] told me that I should quit.

I'm constantly asked, "Are you going to re-form the Police again?" And I always say, "No, we're not." But I think leaving the band at the height of its success allowed me, in all honesty, to use some of that momentum to fuel my first solo record.

"Every Breath You Take" from "Synchronicity" was No. 1 on Billboard's singles chart for eight weeks. Did you know that was a hit when you wrote it?

I knew that was a hit immediately. I mean, there's nothing original in the song at all. It's a major chord followed by a relative minor. How many pop songs have been written like that? "Stand by Me" comes to mind ... hundreds. The lyrics you could get out of any rhyming dictionary. "Moon ... June." And yet there's something about that song which I think is powerful. I think its power comes from its ambivalence. It's actually a very sentimental, comforting song, almost romantic, and yet it's quite sinister at the same time.

How do you know when you've got a song right?

Sometimes I don't get it right. Sometimes you write a song and record it and finish the album and you work on it through the process of touring and figure it out that way. It might take a while, and you go, "I see. We should have done it that way." My point is the record is really just the starting point. It's the blueprint for what will eventually become something evolved. Something better.

With "The Dream of the Blue Turtles," you put yourself back in a large band again instead of a trio. Why?

I just wanted to feel that warmth around me again. It was really exciting to work with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Omar Hakim, Daryl Jones ... what a band! And there's little old me, bossing them around [laughs].

Did that album accomplish want you wanted it to?

Absolutely! It allowed me to make another record. That's the success of any record you do ... being allowed to do another one.

One of the biggest hits from this album is "Fortress Around Your Heart." Lyrically it's not something you hear a lot about in songs, which is someone apologizing for realizing they have shattered someone else. How did that song come about?

I think this album is very much about the breakup of the structure of marriage [Sting split from his first wife, Frances Tomelty, in the early '80s], and it's interesting I chose a symbol of a fortress that is apparently impregnable but obviously able to be destroyed. That's the thing about love. On my latest album, I describe how I can be annihilated by it.

That's on the song "Inside," which seems like the flip side of "Fortress." On "Inside," the song is from the perspective of the person who's destroyed, not the destroyer.

As you mature as a songwriter, you grow away from the confessional "me, me, me"-type songs to writing songs where you see the other person's point of view. You become almost like a mini-playwright in that you're writing songs for women to sing or a viewpoint of the third party in a love triangle, and that's a mark of maturity -- that you've stopped really writing about yourself.

Your next solo album, "... Nothing Like the Sun," followed your mother's death. Many of the songs are very female-oriented, including "They Dance Alone." Was that on purpose?

When my mummy died, it was obviously on my mind a lot. I didn't decide I would write a record about women or females or female archetypes, but it just sort of happened naturally -- as it always does. I never have an agenda or a plan when I make a record, just whatever's on my mind or whatever I'm processing will turn up on the record in some recognizable fashion. But I only recognize it at the end of the day.

So you don't go into albums with an agenda, but do you have a goal to show musical growth of some sort?

That's all I really have an intention to do ... to demonstrate that I'm making progress as a musician, as a communicator, as an arranger, producer, lyricist, singer, bandleader, person. I want the listeners to be aware that I'm on a journey and that they're welcome to go along with me if they want.

The next album, "The Soul Cages," deals with your father's death.

My mom and dad died within eight months of each other and, again, I didn't intend to write an album that was about that. That's what was happening inside, and "Soul Cages" came out.

I get more feedback on "The Soul Cages" than any other record. At least three people today at the book signing came up and said how much "Soul Cages" meant to them. That makes me feel heartened that it connected with people at the right level and they understood it. It was my least-understood record, generally -- critically -- when it first came out, and the least commercial, but it has a longevity, which I like to attribute to the fact that it's a real record.

The big hit on that album was "All This Time," which is an interesting contradiction because the lyrics are often despondent, yet the music is quite jaunty. There are other times you've used that, like on "Can't Stand Losing You."

It's a trick I've used a lot, and I say it's a trick in having sad lyrics with a happy tune. I'm not quite sure why it works for me, but there's a subtle irony there too. But, you know, "So Lonely" is a song about alienation and yet it's an incredibly jolly tune. We'd have hundreds of people yelling it and screaming it and having a great time singing about how lonely they are. There's a paradox there, isn't there? I don't quite understand it, but it works. I think ambivalence is always an important characteristic.

Your next album was "Ten Summoner's Tales," which was a play upon both Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" and your last name. The lyrics on your albums are peppered with literary and mythological references: Nabakov, Scylla and Charybdis, Mammon ... You never underestimate the intelligence of your audience, do you?

Well, no. I met a lot of them today, and they all seemed pretty intelligent to me and well-read, and you don't have to know who those people [in my songs] are. These aren't Cliff Notes for a literature test. But again, there's an irony there at work. To put things like that in a pop song amuses the hell out of me. It's not about being pretentious. People ask me "What's a Nabakov?" and I maybe direct them to the local bookstore so they can find out.

Because you're not going to lend them any of your books.

No way, especially not my first edition of "Lolita."

Is anyone's interpretation of your songs ever wrong?

No, of course not. It's always right. Unless someone interpreted "Fields of Gold" as a fascist marching song and then I might say, "Hang on a minute, Fritz. You got the wrong end of the stick here."

"Mercury Falling" found you experimenting with different time signatures and seems slightly off-kilter. What was going through your mind here?

It was kind of a reassessing period. I think I was just trying something different, [to] go back to some roots. There are a lot of tributes to soul music on that record. That was a kind of wintery record. That's me in my woods in November [points to a picture in the CD booklet]. That's Gideon, Trudie's old dog, the wolfhound. He's beautiful. Trudie froze his sperm. She froze some of mine, too [laughs].

In 1999, you released "Brand New Day," which really was a new start for you.

It felt like that. It was made in the run-up to the Millennium. There was a lot of doom and gloom with that 2YK or 2KY or whatever it was, the world was going to end, blah, blah, blah, and I thought, "Well, this is all a crock of s***. We should be optimistic." I always think that's a good strategy in life, no matter what's happening. "Brand New Day" did extremely well for me. It's our biggest-selling record.

"Desert Rose" is a song about longing. The amazing thing is that even though most of us don't know what Cheb Mami is saying on the record, his vocals help convey the feeling.

They do. We heard the track, and I knew I wanted some Arabic singing on there. I played him the melody and he wrote the lyrics, not understanding any English. When he came back, I asked him what they were about, and he said he was singing about a longing for love and peace and all that stuff. So I said, "That's really what I'm singing about" ... How strange, yet how obvious.

On that album you tied in with Jaguar, which is something you'd never done before. That brought tremendous exposure to "Desert Rose."

It wasn't a commercial for Jaguar originally. It was the video, and the director wanted us in a car, and he chose the new Jaguar. Then my manager at the time took our video to Jaguar and said, "What do you think?" They flipped and said, "We'd like to use that as our commercial." They said, "How much do you want?" We said, "We don't really need any money, it's like promotion for our single." So it was a kind of symbiotic, mutually beneficial kind of thing.

I caught some flak for it, but at the same time I don't think any more cars were sold in the world -- maybe a few Jaguars. And I've planted enough trees in my life to feel good enough about my ecological footprint. All of us use fuel. I've used more than my fair share, but I've planted a lot of trees.

What did that teach you about alternative marketing and that you can't just rely on radio?

There was a time when you could be worried about being overexposed. That was a big thing: "Don't overexpose yourself, you'll be finished." Now the case is that you're either overexposed or you're not exposed at all. I really believe that. There's so much competition for people's entertainment dollars. If you want to put your product out there, you have to go out and sell it.

You recorded a live album, "All This Time," in front of a private audience Sept. 11, 2001, in Tuscany. Did you think about canceling that show?

I didn't want to do the show at all after 9/11, but being democratic, if not a Democrat, I put it to the band. They wanted to express their feelings through playing. It's slightly easier on an instrument than a voice, so I said, "Well OK, let's see what the audience wants." We had hundreds of people from everywhere out in my backyard, wondering what the hell was going on, so I put it to them.

We sang "Fragile," which seemed an appropriate song, and had a minute's silence and then I said, "What do you want, should we stop?" And they said they wanted some music. I think they wanted some sort of community feeling, which music does. I'm glad we did it. They kept the cameras rolling. The performance was not the one we rehearsed, but it had a spirit to it. I've never seen the DVD. I wish that record hadn't been associated with 9/11, that's the last thing I want. But it is what it is.

On your latest album, "Sacred Love," the war in Iraq moved you to write "This War."

I think it's true that rich men decide to fight a war and then that the poor die. If it was the other way around, there wouldn't be so many wars. The whole idea of the military industrial complex is a very frightening one -- even Eisenhower warned us against it. I'm not saying anything new. We're in this situation where it's about money, people are dying everyday.

"Sacred Love" was your first album in the post-9/11 world. Did that make it more difficult to create?

Well, they're all difficult to make. It was interesting because at the time [we made the record], we'd had 9/11, we'd had the war in Afghanistan, we were building up to this war in Iraq ... I'm not sorry to see Saddam Hussein gone at all, he was a pig of a man, but he could have been taken out another way.

But that scenario definitely gave the album a kind of urgency. I was swept up in the paranoia that was being foisted on us every day, that he could destroy us in 45 minutes, that we had chemical war around the corner and nuclear weapons. So that gave [the] album a sense that "God, I better get this down on tape." So there's a sense of urgency about it.

In the DVD for "Sacred Love," you talked about how you usually stroll around and the idea for a song will come to you. Is it usually the lyrics first?

No, it's usually the music first now. For a long time, I used to have a refrain and I'd just figure it out from there, and I'd do the music then. But now I tend to finish the music, structure it and don't even think about the lyrics until I've finished structuring, my theory being that if you structure the music correctly, it's already telling you a narrative. All you have to do is translate that from abstract into characters, or words that people say, or mood. And it's an interesting, if lengthy, process; it's a bit like fishing: You're never quite sure what you're going to come up with.

I walk around waiting for a nibble, and you get a fragment of something and you join it to the fragment of something you got the day before and piece it together like a jigsaw and end up with a song. It's a very mysterious and, thankfully, successful process, but you have to be patient.

This is your third project co-producing with Kipper. How do you like to work with a producer?

I always think the term "producer" is a very kind of plastic thing. How do you define production? It's defined by the limitations of the artist. Some producers write the songs, play the songs, perform the songs. They do everything, depending upon how little their artists can do. [The Police's] producers were essentially engineers; they didn't arrange the music, they engineered it. They made the drums sound like drums and the guitars sound like guitars.

Kipper is more creative in that sense. He is a musician, and he's part of that process. I used to program myself for many, many years, and it's just so time-consuming: I wasn't writing songs anymore, I was programming. So to have someone who's very adept at programming and to give you sound ideas and inspiration and instant feedback is a wonderful thing. He's the first producer who's had that facility.

What has been the biggest change in technology that has affected how you make your music?

Digital technology, obviously, in many ways has slowed the process down, because there are so many choices you can hold onto without making a firm decision. In the old days, you just had to play the song and play it right and that was it. So you could make an album in a couple of days.

It's also quite difficult to make digital technology sound warm and enfolding. That's a skill we're developing. It's interesting for someone like me. It means I can really get inside the music and maybe never come out of it, so I always put a stop date on my record and say, "On this certain date, this record will be finished."

How do you stick to that?

We have a tour booked [laughs].

You start another world tour in January. What's it like for you when you step out onto the stage?

It's like being reborn. You step out from the darkness into this world where everybody's pleased to see you, and you sing and you soar above the audience. There's no feeling quite like it. I'm very happy doing that, as long as I get to balance that with my private life, my family life. Largely I get it right, but, you know, sometimes I get it wrong.

What do you still want to say musically?

I don't know the answer to that. I may have nothing more to say, I really don't know until I've tried it. I've just finished an album, I just finished a book. I'm sort of empty of ideas or inspiration, really. I'm going to go around the world for two years, so I'm sure there will be some stimulus that will allow me to think maybe I can try it one more time, but I don't assume anything.

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