‘For All My Days Remaining’ – Sting’s Dark Night of ‘The Soul Cages’ (Conclusion)

Sting’s The Soul Cages

Midway Point

We’re at the halfway mark, folks. Intermission time, as they say in the theater. And Sting dutifully obliges by providing an appropriate musical passage – the equivalent of our seventh-inning stretch – in “Saint Agnes and the Burning Train.” He (on bass) and Dominic Miller (on acoustic guitar) take turns serenading the listener with this ethereal, classically-based interlude, a soothing if slightly melancholy diversion from the “godless sea,” “mountains of endless falling” and doom-laden “dark angels” of the previous number.

This is followed by the seventh track, “The Wild Wild Sea,” a song that “manages to exhibit latter-day sea shanty possibilities,” according to Q magazine’s Peter Kane. Sure enough, Sting’s love of literary language and British romantic poetry (Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” readily comes to mind) manifest themselves to the fullest in this winding, winnowing showpiece:

I saw it again this evening,

Black sail in a pale yellow sky

And just as before in a moment,

It was gone where the gray gulls fly.

If it happens again I shall worry

That only a strange ship could fly

And my sanity scans the horizon

In the light of a darkening sky

As part of the CD’s packaging, the accompanying booklet includes a color reproduction of a black-sail ship against a pale yellow sky amid the maritime expanse, as described above. In fact, all of the paintings (credited to artist Stephen Campbell) serve to contextualize the songwriter’s lyrics in a way that never detracts from, but instead enhances, our enjoyment of them.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Sting talks of plunging into the ocean’s depths (“That night I walked in my slumber / I waded into the sea strand / And I swam with the moon and her lover / Until I lost sight of the land”). Guitars and synthesizer sounds swirl all around him, like hungry gulls skimming the crest for sustenance. After swimming all night, he finds himself on the deck of the self-same black-sail ship:

All around me was silence

As if mocking my frail human hopes

And a question mark hung in the canvas

For the wind that had died in the ropes

Enough ropes to hang oneself? Possibly, but not until he finds what he’s been searching for:

Did I see the shade of a sailor

On the bridge through the wheelhouse pane

Held fast to the wheel of the rocking ship

As I squinted my eyes in the rain

For the ship had turned into the wind

Against the storm to brace

And underneath the sailor’s hat

I saw my father’s face

Now we know: Sting was seeking his poor dead father – to see him, to be with him, for a precious few moments or two, and for old time’s sake. Will he stay by his side, forever? The last lines provide the key:

If a prayer today is spoken

Please offer it for me

When the bridge to heaven is broken

And you’re lost on the wild wild sea

You’re lost on the wild wild sea…

There’s no going back. “You’re lost in the wild wild sea” is repeated, over and over, the drum-pounding taking over the rhythm, the electric guitars pulling the theme along in the manner of the lyrical ropes mentioned above. Just then, as the music begins to die away with the verse, the Northumbrian pipes are heard in the distance – reminding us that all is not lost, that life goes on as before. Well, maybe not as before, but it will go on. One day our loved ones will join us in death, Sting is saying, his voice spare, lean and stark against the rising tide.

Catharsis and Apotheosis

Sting (stingfans.wordpress.com)

With the emergence of the title tune, “The Soul Cages,” all hell breaks loose, musically speaking. No longer fenced in by the songwriter’s sonic restrictions, the musicians are set free to blast away in a veritable free-for-all. Manu Katché takes the lead as the driving force of this, the most impressive cut on the album. It’s the only place where Sting purposely emphasizes his British accent, the nasal, twang-filled discourse of a Newcastle native – proud, deliberate, defiant – throwing caution to the winds, drawing the listener into his world, the world of a “boy child… locked in the fisherman’s yard.”

Where is the fisherman, where is the goat?

Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?

Eclipse on the moon when the dark bird flies

Where is the child with his father’s eyes?

Yes, dear listener, where is that child? And for that matter, where is his father? Why, they’re right here, “in the cage with me,” claims Davy Jones, in this patented Dante-inspired vision of a seagoing Inferno:

These are the souls of the broken factories

The subject slaves of the broken crown

The dead accounting of old guilty promises

These are the souls of the broken town

It’s the theme of “Island of Souls,” of the “broken factories” of aging shipbuilders, of reality breaking in on the band’s frolic for one last go-around, with the reedy oboe in lieu of those unnerving pipes. The same lyrics are interposed as well, so there’s no missing the point (“He dreamed of the ship on the sea / It would carry his father and he / To a place they could never be found / To a place far away from this town / A Newcastle ship without coals / They would sail to the island of souls”). This is Sting’s rock anthem, and by all rights the CD should wrap it up here. But it doesn’t. What comes next is the most perplexing, most offbeat number of all: a morose, dirge-like downer of a ballad, the track “When the Angels Fall.”

What possessed the man to do this? Why not end this tribute to dear old dad on a more upbeat note? There was a time when I couldn’t bear to listen to this number. I used to program my compact disc player to bypass mode, looping it back to the opening “Island of Souls” instead of plowing through this depressing piece. In recent years, however, I’ve opened myself up to its hidden beauties. Lord, this is a gorgeous setting of a masterfully composed song! It’s taken me “all this time” (tongue planted firmly in my cheek) to appreciate the myriad sonorities and psycho-acoustic properties inherent in it.

As the longest cut on the album, it provides us with the catharsis one needs in order to form a concise opinion of what went on before. “When the Angels Fall” takes the form of a sermon (echoing the earlier “All This Time” with its priestly visitors), and is the most overtly “spiritual” of Sting’s musical missives. Symbols abound and recur from previous tracks: of angels watching over us as we sleep, of seagulls soaring in a cloudless sky, of “shadows on the wall” and other references to death and dying:

Take your father’s cross

Gently from the wall

A shadow still remaining

See the churches fall

All of this in minor key, with keyboards and guitars gently permeating the air, with voices from other songs (especially “Island of Souls” and “Why Should I Cry For You?”) wading in and out of the soundscape. Finally, we reach an apotheosis, the culmination of Sting’s vision of the afterlife:

These are my feet

These are my hands

These are my children

And this is my demand

Bring down the angels

Cast them from my sight

I never want to see

A million suns at midnight

The image of the redeemer (“These are my feet / these are my hands”), which is indicative of Christ’s showing of his wounds to a skeptical flock of Doubting Thomases, clashes with our contemporary notions of an all-loving, all-forgiving godhead. What he demands of his people, then, is more problematic. It’s not the demons he wishes us to cast out, Sting tells us, but the fallen angels, knowing full well that Lucifer (Satan’s former self) was once the Prince of Angels, before he was cast down to earth for fomenting rebellion (“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” per Milton’s Paradise Lost), in another of Sting’s many literary allusions.

Again, mirroring “Island of Souls” and its lyrical construct, the singer’s voice rises in agony and scale, reaching the height of torment as the song shifts into high gear (and switches to a major key) for its concluding thoughts:

Your hands are empty

The streets are empty

You can’t control us

You can’t control us anymore

When the angels fall

Sting (stingfans.wordpress.com)

Droning on ad nauseam for several minutes, this brilliantly executed coda, in addition to Miller’s quasi-cavaquinho-like mode (very Brazilian sounding, I might add, and book-ending “Island of Souls” quite nicely) and Manu’s lightly tapped rim shots, ends softly – just as The Soul Cages began – with the simplest of sign-offs, i.e., Sting tossing off a casual “Good night” to his audience.

I’ve held back many of my comments to keep this analysis down to human proportions. I could go on and on, though, extolling the virtues of Sting’s most personal recorded statement. But I’d rather leave it to readers to come to their own conclusions about The Soul Cages. I’ll be going back to it soon, I assure you. It’s that good.