ABC News

Grammy-winning artist - and now Broadway lyricist and composer - Sting said it was his mother who'd introduced show music to their household when he was growing up.

"She brought rock n roll into the house - Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis - but she also had all of the Rogers and Hammerstein collection. And so I ate those records for breakfast. And that was my musical education," he told ABC News.

Watch: Sting talks new gig as Broadway composer and lyricist. Related: Why Sting won't leave his children a trust fund.

Sting, who said "Carousel" was his favorite show, followed by "Oklahoma," has his first musical set to open on Broadway in October.

The show titled "The Last Ship" is set in his hometown in northeast England and focuses on the closing of a shipyard and its ramifications on the community.

Although Sting's father was a milkman - "he would work seven days a week" - his grandfather and great-grandfather built ships as did many generations of his family.

"I worked most days with him (my father.) I was up at 5 in the morning, delivering milk when all my school friends were in bed," he said. "I still get up really early, even though I've got nothing to do. … It gave me a work ethic."

In 1990, he'd written an album titled "Soul Cages" about the death of his father and the shipyard the family had lived next to.

Sting said he started thinking about a musical expanding on the metaphor of his father's death and the shipyard about five years ago and pitched his idea to a Broadway producer.

"The Last Ship" played in Chicago in June to great reviews.

"The play is about a grand gesture. These men who used to build ships decided they would build one last ship as a gesture and they'd build it for themselves and sail off into the sunset," he said.

Sting said it was a different experience not being the performer and just watching and composing on the sidelines, but he was getting used to it.

"You just have to relinquish a lot. … I don't have much to do at this point. We have a wonderful director. We have a wonderful choreographer, a great creative team so I'm called in for maybe one detail a day. … I don't have a huge task at the moment," he said.

Sting said he absolutely thought the play's universal message would resonate with Americans.

"This is a play about community," he said. "It's why you think the way you do. It's why you behave the way you do. The answers are all within that community. … This play is really a creative return to the values I was given as a child."