International musician Sting has won 16 Grammy Awards and sold over 100 million records. But in a recent interview for Rolling Stone, the 64-year-old admits that he spends a lot of time thinking about death. He often stares at a 1962 photo of his boyhood street in Newcastle, England. It's all dust—his parents, his house, the shipyard at the end of the street. This makes his mood sad and disconsolate.

He also thinks about rock music icons who have recently died, like Prince and David Bowie: "I'm 64. Most of my life has been lived already, and then, like most of us when a cultural icon dies, we're children. Because you think, 'How could he or she die?'"

After performing recently before 100,000 fans in Australia he spent most of his time alone in the hotel "thinking about having more days behind him than in front of him." Sting, raised a Catholic, "I have been thinking about death since I was a kid. I get a kind of spiritual vertigo. I was brought up in a religious background with ideas of eternity, eternal torment or eternal heaven … I became obsessed with it, maybe morbid about it."

Sting attempts to face death by regularly taking the psychedelic drug ayahuasca. "I think it's a way of rehearsing the feeling of being dead. Every time, I have to work up the courage to do it. You basically face your mortality, and it's as if you're dead, out of time… Most people die in total panic. Terror. I think there's another way. We're supposed to die. There must be a way to die peacefully and welcoming."