The one song Sting said he never understood: “There’s a kind of symbolic magic”
Rockstars have a way of spinning massive poetic prophecies from their lyrics, and in certain respects, this can be even more important than musicality in reeling in an audience and keeping them there for decades upon decades of sonic rapture. You’d be hard-pressed to find a great of the game who’d disagree – that is, except Sting.
In fairness, the Police frontman is hardly a stranger to penning a mammoth hit, with era-defining records like ‘Roxanne’ and so many others having come from his own fair hand and revered by fellow huge artists the world over. But venturing away from the backup of the band and making his way to rock god status in his own right, it seems maybe Sting’s approach to songwriting became a little bit slacker.
Throughout the course of the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he garnered a string of seismic solo success through albums, including Ten Summoner’s Tales. However, when it came to the release of his 1996 record Mercury Falling, arguably Sting’s intuitions were a lot looser, especially when it came to his awkwardly dark tune ‘I Hung My Head’.
At the time of its release, Sting joked that: “I wrote that riff, and now I forget how to play it!” However, he continued: “I just give them to Dominic [Miller, longtime guitarist sideman] to play or develop, sort of like the Police.” The song depicts stark imagery of its main protagonist accidentally shooting someone while on horseback and facing the social repercussions of this violence, which, to all intents and purposes, might suggest a pretty interesting backstory behind its genesis.
But even still, Sting admitted that: “I’m still not sure what the fuck it’s about, but the key is when he admits to the judge that he was fooling around with the gun because he felt ‘the power of death over life’.” In an attempt to flesh out a supposed meaning, he added: “There’s a kind of symbolic magic attached to the concept of a gun that will almost create a situation where you have to use it, or you use it by accident.”
Although he couldn’t seem to truly wrap his head around what he had created, it seems Sting’s off-the-cuff ruminations over yielded power and the significance of violence resonated with other musical giants, even if not so much himself. Inspired by the song’s country and western basis, it was later covered by the ‘Man in Black’, Johnny Cash, in 2002, breathing whole new life into the tune and sealing it a status as one of modern country music’s finest yarns.
While no doubt this is a fairly impressive legacy for a song that began life merely as an album track, it is also quite ironic that the country gods lapped it up so much, given that Sting himself was stumped over its meaning. If nothing else, it just shows the power of a good songwriter because if you can spin something so poetic when you don’t really know what you’re on about, you must know that you’re on to a winner.
