Considering the subject matter, The Soul Cages could have been a mawkish, self-involved disaster; instead it contains some of Sting's best work
I didn't shed one tear about my father's death ... I was totally bewildered by that. I was expecting it ... But I couldn't. I don't know why. I realised that I had to do something ... And my only source of that kind of release is music. But for two years I couldn't write. I did anything to distract myself. Finally, when I finished The Soul Cages and I was alone in the studio and I played the album, I wept, I completely lost it. —Sting, 1996
The process of mourning is already a painful and difficult business, but often societal and cultural expectations make things even more difficult, placing an expectation of impossibly swift recovery on the mourner. We are usually expected to "work through" our grief, sticking to routine in order to allow life to return to normal. Of course, life is never quite the way it was again; when a loved one dies, in a sense, a part of our personality dies too. Add to this the ambivalent feelings many adult children harbor when a parent dies—the sadness combined with anger, impatience, estrangement, and guilt at harboring these negative feelings—and mourning becomes agonizing, something to be avoided.
Like many children, Gordon Sumner grew up with feelings of ambivalence regarding his parents—particularly his father. While his mother was loving and engaging, introducing her son to the world of music, his father was a distant, disappointed man. The elder Mr. Sumner had always longed for a life at sea, but had instead settled for work in a dairy; as life went on, he became increasingly distracted and rarely acknowledged his son's accomplishments. Driven by a constant, impossible desire to please his father, Gordon finally gave up trying and left home at the age of 19. It took many years until Gordon—eventually nicknamed Sting—began to be reconciled with his family, but it came too late. In 1987, first his mother and then his father passed away, and a two-year period of denial and writer's block set in.
In context, it seems almost inevitable that an album like The Soul Cages would have to be made—not only to get Sting past his block, but to help him through the mourning that he'd been pushing away. Many cathartic projects, however, are useful only as therapy and offer little artistic value to anyone outside the writer. This is not the case with The Soul Cages—in my opinion, it contains the best work Sting has produced to date.
Island of Souls
The track opens and closes with a solo on the Uillean pipes, one of the most mournful and isolated sounds in music. It segues into a working-class ballad, set in 6/8 time; the background is reminiscent of the surge and fall of the sea, a theme that permeates every track of this album. Sting sings with a bit of working-class accent, too, the tale of a boy whose father works in an industrial shipyard, who never seems to be able to get ahead and is finally mortally injured in a workplace accident. The lyrics are perhaps the most indulgent of the album, but they are important in that they set the stage, introducing several themes that will be developed in subsequent songs.
All This Time
The relatively upbeat tempo of this song pretty much guaranteed it the most radio play. However, the lyrics are something else altogether, focusing on loss of belief and questioning the usefulness of religion at a time of death. Again there is a strong theme of ships and the ocean, paired with the ephemeral nature of humanity; the beliefs of men may rise and fall and rise again, but through it all the flow of the river is constant:
Teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple, an edge of the empire
Garrison town
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, 'til all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found
All this time the river flowed...
There are some great descriptive lyrics in this song: "the sad shire horses walking home in the sodium light," priests described as "fussing and flapping in priestly black like a murder of crows," etc.
Mad About You
The track kicks off with what sounds like an acoustic steel guitar. There's a sweeping, percussive beat with urgent strings in the background as Sting sings of his heart "lost on a distant planet [Venus?] that whirls around the April moon, whirling in an arc of sadness." Other reviewers have indicated the lyrics reflect the love of David for Bathsheba, but for me it's always conjured a mental image of a medieval Crusader in the Holy Land, unable to sleep and thinking of his faraway beloved. While superficially unrelated to the rest of the album, the song does make reference to the poem "Ozymandias" and the ultimate futility of mortal effort:
They say a city in the desert lies
The vanity of an ancient king
But the city lies in broken pieces
Where the wind howls and the vultures sing
These are the works of man
This is the sum of our ambition...
Jeremiah Blues (Part 1)
Jeremiah was an Old Testament prophet who lived at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. In his day, the previous awe reserved for holy men had largely dissipated, and although Jeremiah foresaw all that was to happen, very few people cared to listen. Indeed, legend holds that he was murdered by his own people. This song named for the seer nobody would heed is jazzy, with slyly sarcastic lyrics about the near future of our culture. The Cassandra-like narrator even foresees his own "kill-the-messenger" demise:
Sometimes they tie a thief to the tree
Sometimes I stare
Sometimes it's me
Why Should I Cry For You?
In my opinion, this is the best song of the album. The song begins with a deep, solemn but not sedate beat, echoed by a repetitive musical call like a chant. The lyrics bring to mind the cold clarity of a sailor working on an icebreaker ship near the Arctic circle. The repeated refrain "Would north be true?" refers both to the sailor's dependence on the compass to steer him correctly, and the dependence of children on their parents—when the compass is gone, will we be set "drifting in empty seas" for the rest of our lives?
The most heartfelt passage in the album comes as the music swells to a crescendo and Sting, never losing control, sings a phrase that rings in the ear like a cry of utter loss:
Dark angels follow me
Over a godless sea
Mountains of endless falling
For all my days remaining
He questions what the point of mourning might be: "Why should I cry for you? Why would you want me to? What would it mean to say that 'I loved you in my fashion?'" When people mourn, do they ever cry on behalf of the dead, or do they cry for themselves and their own sense of loss? If you've lost a parent, this can be an especially difficult track to listen to, but it's worth your while.
Saint Agnes and the Burning Train
A short instrumental that seems designed to lighten the mood, this song is very reminiscent of Spanish classical guitar. Saint Agnes, if you're wondering, was an early Christian who was put to death at 12 years of age for refusing to renounce her vow of chastity.
The Wild, Wild Sea
The music of this song is very loosely structured, almost slow jazz. It's more of a sung poem than a song, with dreamlike images associated with death—swimming out into the sea until one loses sight of land; waking up wrapped in white linen with a clay-colored sky above, like a corpse; standing on the deck of a ship stuck in a dead-calm sea. It also hearkens back to the Viking tradition that ships bore away the souls of the dead. Near the end of the song, a storm sets up and the narrator sees the ghost of a sailor behind the wheel—this is the turning point of the album, as the sailor is willing to turn and guide the ship of his son's life even from beyond the grave:
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
The Soul Cages
The title track is, oddly enough, my least favorite song—it's the only one with a driving rock beat and heavy use of electric guitars, a very different mood from the rest of the album. This is a retelling of the Orpheus legend; in this tale, a child comes to barter for his father's life. But in this retelling, Hades/Satan is recast as an infernal fisherman in a foggy hell, keeping damned souls in lobster cages. The child challenges the fisherman to a drinking contest, using a magical wine made from the blood of the working men of the sea; the fisherman agrees, on the condition that the child must forfeit his own soul if he loses. In the end, his father's soul goes free and the last refrain is identical to the ending in Island of Souls, only this time in 4/4 time:
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
When The Angels Fall
When you were a child, your parents might have assured you that the angels were watching over you, but in your child's mind it was your parents who were the real angels; you looked to them to keep you safe. What happens when the surety of their presence is gone? In this slow, moody song, Sting appears to be casting away his beliefs and the controlling influences they have exerted upon him:
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
Your hands are empty
The streets are empty
You can't control us
You can't control us anymore
As the song continues, there is a change from a minor to a major key, a sense of sunlight breaking through the fog, and at the very end, a bit of the signature sound from All This Time. At the very end of the track, as the music fades away, Sting bids us good night.
The Soul Cages isn't one of Sting's best-known albums, but it deserves greater renown. Its intelligent lyrics and honest treatment of the emotions of mourning make it well worth your time.