In the liner notes for “Nothing Like the Sun,” Sting wrote, "...'Lazarus Heart' was a vivid nightmare that I wrote down and then fashioned into a song. A learned friend of mine informs me that it is the archetypical dream of the fisher king...can't I do anything original?"
[Michael Baty]: The Fisher King is an old character from mythology about which I don't understand a great deal. But, the basis of him seems to be that he is a tragic figure who is constantly searching for the thing that is staring at him in the face, but he never, or seldom realises. Perhaps a more pertinent link to the song is in the title: Lazarus, who is of course the biblical character who is brought back from the dead by Christ. This is echoed in the song via the wound the character in the song finds, and despite the pain inflicted, the wound brings forward a great thing, life (in the shape of a flower). I guess another strand in all this is the fact that not long before this album Sting's mother died, so the song ties in the images of death and pain with the mother figure, and a realisation that her fate will be a fate that we will all share ("Birds on the roof of my mother's house, no stone to chase them away, birds on the roof of my mother's house, sit on my own roof some day"). In this last passage there is also a feeling of guilt and helplessness in the face of the death of a loved one, and in Sting's case a symbol of a life left behind (he didn't go to the funeral in Newcastle for he felt that it would turn it into a media event, so this was denied him). But for all this it is an up-beat song, and the final verse illustrates that we all live on in our children ("they fly at the windows they fly at the wall, where does she get the strength to fight them anymore, counts all her children as a shield against the pain, turns her eyes to the sky like a flower to the rain"). Returning to the imagery of the flower; regrowth and hope.
In the liner notes for “Nothing Like the Sun,” Sting wrote, "...'Lazarus Heart' was a vivid nightmare that I wrote down and then fashioned into a song. A learned friend of mine informs me that it is the archetypical dream of the fisher king...can't I do anything original?"
[Michael Baty]: The Fisher King is an old character from mythology about which I don't understand a great deal. But, the basis of him seems to be that he is a tragic figure who is constantly searching for the thing that is staring at him in the face, but he never, or seldom realises. Perhaps a more pertinent link to the song is in the title: Lazarus, who is of course the biblical character who is brought back from the dead by Christ. This is echoed in the song via the wound the character in the song finds, and despite the pain inflicted, the wound brings forward a great thing, life (in the shape of a flower). I guess another strand in all this is the fact that not long before this album Sting's mother died, so the song ties in the images of death and pain with the mother figure, and a realisation that her fate will be a fate that we will all share ("Birds on the roof of my mother's house, no stone to chase them away, birds on the roof of my mother's house, sit on my own roof some day"). In this last passage there is also a feeling of guilt and helplessness in the face of the death of a loved one, and in Sting's case a symbol of a life left behind (he didn't go to the funeral in Newcastle for he felt that it would turn it into a media event, so this was denied him). But for all this it is an up-beat song, and the final verse illustrates that we all live on in our children ("they fly at the windows they fly at the wall, where does she get the strength to fight them anymore, counts all her children as a shield against the pain, turns her eyes to the sky like a flower to the rain"). Returning to the imagery of the flower; regrowth and hope.