Valley Stream’s Shaggy enjoying collaboration with Sting
Shaggy, left, and Sting perform during the 60th Annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 28, 2018. Credit: Getty Images for NARAS / Kevin Winter
Valley Stream’s Shaggy couldn’t have asked for a bigger rollout for his new album-length collaboration with Sting.
They launched the first single “Don’t Make Me Wait” (Interscope/A&M) by performing it on the Grammys last month and then in the Super Bowl preshow.
The whole project, which will be called “44/876” and released on April 20, has been a surprise for the “It Wasn’t Me” singer and the former Police frontman.
They were brought together by a mutual friend — Martin Kierszenbaum, Sting’s manager and Shaggy’s former A&R executive — and the song “Don’t Make Me Wait,” which they finished in half an hour.
“We realized at that point just how amazing our voices went together,” Shaggy explained on “Hot 97” (WQHT/97.1 FM). “What is happening is really just happening out of friendship.”
After working with writers and musicians like Sly & Robbie’s Robbie Shakespeare, the new duo soon completed an entire album in New York, though Sting said he had to get used to how popular Shaggy was in Jamaica, where Shaggy lives when he’s not in Valley Stream. “It’s like going to Rome with the pope,” Sting said, explaining on “Hot 97” what it was like to film the video there. “He’s so revered there and rightly so.”
