I like music with balls. Instrumentation doesn’t matter. We’re not talking about loud necessarily. A lud fuzzy guitar doesn’t always equal balls. Just listen to the main theme of Conan the Barbarian by Basil Poledouris. There ain’t much bigger balls than that and not a guitar to be strummed. I’m a huge fan of Sting, from the police to his solo material of every phase. In 1991 he hired guitar player Dominic Miller. At the time, 22 years ago, I was unimpressed. At the time I was into rock and metal, so he wasn’t on my radar.

In 1993, exactly 20 years ago, Sting released another album, this one called TEN SUMMONERS TALES. Dominic Miller’s guitar of choice was the nylon string classical guitar. Strangely, his sound became much more ballsy, even though it was an acoustic guitar. Not only was his playing more in depth, complex, and melodic, but the attitude seemed to just come through in spades.

The song he co-wrote, SHAPE OF MY HEART, epitomizes this sound. That song played in several feature films, including THREESOME and far more notably on the soundtrack to LEON aka THE PROFESSIONAL in 1994. The composer of the score, Eric Serra, loved the song so much and the edit of the film needed about :60-:70 seconds of additional music to time out right, so he asked Dominic Miller to compose a longer instrumental intro and he did. It sounded perfect to the rest of the score and finished out the film.

In the years since, I have become much more a fan of Sting and his right hand man, Dominic Miller. There are several performances out there which is just the two of them together doing songs like FRAGILE or the aforementioned SHAPE OF MY HEART.

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Peter John Ross

A filmmaker, a dreamer, and the world's only Dan Akroyd Cosplayer

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