Sting and Shaggy, together at last, make album for 4/20

I would have liked to have imagined that Sting—multi-platinum recording artist, lead singer of new wave band The Police and one-time heir to the House Harkonnen—only just heard Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me.’ That Sting just happened to hear Shaggy’s hit opus about trying to convince your partner it was someone else having a tryst all over the apartment and responded, “Well this guy’s great, we have to get in touch with him.” 

The truth is they bumped into each other because they currently share a manager.

The two musicians announced this week that they will have a collaborative album dropping on, when else, 4/20, called 44/876. In a Rolling Stone feature, they explain that the album will be a love letter to Jamaica. Shaggy was born in Kingston, Jamaica and Sting, who took reggae influences and ran a hundred miles with them, have been collaborating over the last few months on the project.

“The most important thing to me in any kind of music is surprise,” Sting, singer of surprises like Desert Rose and Brand New Day, told Rolling Stone. “And everybody is surprised by this collaboration—by what they’re hearing. We’re surprising.”

Just to assure us that we aren’t just being taken for a ride, Shaggy and Sting (who I’m going to call ‘Shtingy’) have already released the first single, called “Don’t Make Me Wait.” 

“I really liked the first one,” Shaggy told Rolling Stone, “it says where I’m from. I was trying to figure out how to work that in, something about Jamaica, but it’s better if you say it.”

Sting has also recently revealed he will be playing a talking wolf in the upcoming indie video game Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. Surprise!