At this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver, Sting performed songs from his Broadway-bound musical The Last Ship, which tells the story of the songwriter’s experiences growing up in the shadow of a shipyard in northeast England. “it’s ironic that the landscape I worked so hard to escape from, the community I more or less abandoned, is where I had to return to to find my missing muse. As soon as I decided to honor the community I came from to tell their story, the songs started to come thick and fast.”