Sting has been honored with Bass Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
While the magazine’s 2026 awards ceremony will take place Jan. 22 in Santa Ana, California, the mag presented Sting with his award earlier in New York, sharing the moment in a video on Instagram.
In the clip, Sting jokes that while it’s a lifetime achievement honor, he’s “only halfway through” his lifetime. He then gets serious and says, “Thank you so much, I’m deeply, deeply honored, profoundly honored.”
The rocker then reads from a letter he wrote in 2001 about the Fender bass guitar, which he says was addressed to the “archeologist of the future.”
“There are few artifacts of the 20th century as consistently recognized and recognizable as the Fender bass. Those elegant functional lines have etched themselves into our consciousness for over half a century,” he says. “A Fender bass can shake a room with its thunder or moan softly like a sleeping giant. The bass is the ground of all harmony, the root, the foundation of all musical structure.”
He adds, “A Fender bass has been my constant companion for most of my life, a brother to me, sister. The loom on which I have woven dreams and stories, and my oldest friend.”
Next up for Sting, he’ll star in a production of his musical The Last Ship, which is set to open in Amsterdam on Jan. 13. He’ll also appear in a run at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House from June 9 to 14.
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