The Soul Cages was an album of mourning. When you lose both your parents, you realize you’re an orphan. But sadness is a good thing, too, to feel a loss so deeply. You mustn’t let people insist on cheering you up.
Sting quoted in Billboard magazine, 1999
The often fraught relationships between fathers and sons is one of those recurring themes in popular music, the subject of songs both maudlin and genuinely moving. In Harry Chapin’s somewhat overwrought Cats in the Cradle, Pops is too busy clawing his way up the corporate ladder to pay his kid any attention; in Father and Son by Cat Stevens (back before he became everybody’s favourite book critic), a dad tries to persuade his headstrong boy to take things a little easier, and not be in such a lather to grow up, get away from home, and take on the entire world; Beautiful Boy is John Lennon’s loving portrait of his baby boy Sean (written, poignantly, not long before his death, and released posthumously); Billy Bragg’s Tank Park Salute, a superbly evocative remembrance of a childhood tragedy featured in this space not long ago, portrays a son coping with the pain and dislocation of having lost his dad while still himself just a young man:
Why Should I Cry For You, released on the 1991 album The Soul Cages, is likewise a song born of the intense, complex, and in this case contradictory emotions arising in the wake of a father’s death, and is perhaps the most emotionally honest composition in Sting’s entire catalogue, dealing not just with the sadness of losing a father, but the ambivalence attending the death of a parent with whom, apparently, little love was lost. The tone isn’t so much mournful as lost and disoriented, its protagonist forced to confront the reality that the old man is gone for good, having passed on before anything could be done to set things right. It’s as if he’s suffered a loss of purpose; things might not have been all warm and fuzzy between him and his father, but the relationship still provided a sort of organizing principle, something to strive for, a hope, perhaps, that maybe some day. Now the door’s slammed shut, that’s it, it’s over, and there he sits with nothing to hang on to but the lingering bitterness, and a void that can never quite be filled.
Wrote Sting in a 2007 anthology of his lyrics:
My father died in 1989. We’d had a difficult relationship and his death hit me harder than I’d imagined possible. I felt emotionally and creatively paralyzed, isolated, and unable to mourn…It was as if the joy had been leached out of my life. Eventually, I talked myself into going back to work and this sombre collection of songs was the result.
Like Leonard Cohen before him, Sting saw sailors and ships navigating hostile seas as an apt metaphor for feelings of loss, isolation, dislocation, and loneliness. It goes back to his roots growing up in the shipbuilding town of Wallsend in Northumberland. His childhood home sat literally in the shadow of a bustling shipyard, where as a little boy he could watch the construction of great steel vessels as they rose from the keel to tower over the neighbourhood houses. It left an indelible impression:
I started with my first memory and from there everything started to flow. My first memory was of a ship, because I lived next to a shipyard when I was young and it was a very powerful image of this huge ship towering above the house. Tapping into that was a godsend – I began with that and the album just flowed.
Thus he pictures himself plying the cold and unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic, hauling on frozen rigging with nothing but the stars to guide him.
Under the dog star sail
Over the reefs of moonshine
Under the skies of fall
North, north west, the stones of Faroe
Under the Arctic fire
Over the seas of silence
Hauling on frozen ropes
For all my days remaining
But would north be true?
The listener may be struck by the repetition of those closing lines throughout: for all my days remaining, and would North be true? He’s on his own now, as doubtful of the course he’s supposed to set as he is keenly aware, in a way he probably couldn’t have been before, that death is real and permanent, and his own days are numbered, just like everybody’s. Dark angels are stalking him as he sails the godless sea.
Which leaves him – where, exactly? What’s he supposed to do? What’s he supposed to feel? What can he feel? Should he, now that his father’s dead, make a show of mustering up the unambiguously loving emotions that were never his while the man was still alive? Isn’t it time to mourn properly, perhaps to forgive, and attain the perspective that comes with maturity? That would probably be healthy, but does it seem right? Does he even have it in him?
What would be true?
Sometimes I see your face,
The stars seem to lose their place
Why must I think of you?
Why must I?
Why should I?
Why should I cry for you?
Why would you want me to?
And what would it mean to say,
That, ‘I loved you in my fashion’?
It sounds angry, and it is, I suppose (as evidenced by the lyric in another track on the album, All This Time: If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river and I’d bury the old man/ I’d bury him at sea). Yet it’s so much more. One senses that even as the singer asks why on earth he ought to be crying, he’s actually bawling his eyes out. Despite everything, he did love his father, and he craved his father’s love. With the old man’s death, a deep and abiding hope has died too. It was as if the joy had been leached out of my life.
I’m reminded of the final scene of A Voyage Round My Father, the wonderful autobiographical play written by John Mortimer (of Rumpole of the Bailey fame), which portrays the author’s own difficult, generally dysfunctional, but ultimately loving father-son relationship. The play closes at the father’s deathbed. When it’s over, and his dad’s gone, the lights fade over the stage as the son turns to the audience:
I’d been told all the things you’re meant to feel. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you’re in no one’s shadow.
I know what I felt. Lonely.
the needlefish 