The pop legend who became Snoop Dogg’s mentor: “A fan since I was a kid”
For his Dr Dre-produced album from 2024, Missionary, Snoop Dogg pulled out all the stops. He invited an A-list collection of guests onto the record, including, but not limited to Method Man, Eminem and 50 Cent.
But arguably the most surprising inclusion was Sting, the former Police frontman. He and Snoop don’t necessarily seem like the most natural of fits, at least on the surface, but that’s not remotely the case. Snoop loves Sting, and it seems the feeling is mutual.
For the track ‘Another Part of Me,’ old collaborators Snoop and Dre reworked the Police song ‘Message In A Bottle,’ but they also got Sting himself to record new vocals for it. As Sting revealed during an interview on BBC Radio 2, he also played guitar on the new track.
Sting also mentioned that Snoop actually sings on the then-unreleased song, which he described as “quite a revelation.” He also characterised Snoop as “a very nice man.”
As for Snoop, he’s claimed that he actively looks up to Sting as an inspiration. As he reflected to Complex in 2024, he had been “a fan of Sting since [he] was a kid,” so he was very keen to get him onto his new album. When he and Dre found themselves interpolating ‘Message In A Bottle,’ they began to think it was worth going one better and getting Sting to record new material for the track they were working on.
Their effort bore immediate success. After they sent Sting their track, he immediately replied with new vocals for them to use. Snoop, for one, was very impressed with his input.
“He sound harder than me on that,” he remarked with admiration. “I’m like, damn Sting, you cold-blooded with this shit.”
This wasn’t the only experience Snoop got to enjoy with Sting. In his capacity as a judge on The Voice, he spent some time with Sting, who agreed to mentor some contestants on the show. From hanging out with Sting during the show’s recording, Snoop claimed that he learned “how to be a better listener.”
“Even at the stage of his career,” Snoop said of Sting, “he was still able to listen and receive information. So I like that about him, and I’m still able to do the same thing to take my star and say put that shit to the side and go back to being a student for a minute.”