Fields Of Gold

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Sting has written many great, often powerful songs. But Fields of Gold is perhaps his most beautiful song. In a 2018 interview, Paul McCartney said that Fields of Gold was a song he wished he'd written himself. In my version, I've arranged and sung the song in the manner of a chant — with the intent that, by the end of the song, you've been transported into a different state altogether. To serve that purpose, I've added a new verse and a choral accompaniment for the latter part of the song.

A song with a traditional structure and feeling. Sting is a musician and songwriter with a deep connection to traditional music. He listens to the music of Bach every day. In 2006, he released Songs from the Labyrinth, an album of sixteenth century lute music. He wrote Fields of Gold in the very traditional style of a story being told through a series of verses. That style draws from Celtic and Middle English traditions, in both music and lyrics. (The title of the album on which Fields of Gold was released was Ten Summoner's Tales, a reference to a character — the summoner — in Chaucer's Middle English classic, The Canterbury Tales.) Of the lyric, "So she took her love for to gaze awhile upon the fields of barley", Sting told interviewer Daniel Rachel (The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters), "I'm using poetic license to alter syntax. I wanted to create a timeless idea that the song could have been written in the sixteenth century." The musical accompaniment in Fields of Gold includes Northumbrian smallpipes, a traditional bagpipe-like instrument from North East England.

Covers of this song. Many artists have sung Fields of Gold. Some of the most notable are from Eva Cassidy, Katie Melua, Maelyn Jarmon, and Sting's own lute version of the song from his album of traditional lute songs.

My version of this song. Sting: "A song is a living artifact, it's an organism, it's not a museum piece. . . so you have to breathe oxygen into it." When I began doing a cover Fields of Gold, the song itself led me to a very different version from Sting's original version. Here's how that occurred.

I first began looking carefully at the structure of the song. Two things immediately stood out me:

1. It was a love story, told in sequence from its beginning ("In his arms she fell as her hair came down among the fields of gold") to its end. The end is not made explicit, but is implied: The reference to children — "See the children run as the sun goes down" — shows time has passed and the couple now have children or grandchildren, and the "sun goes down" is suggesting the man's life is reaching its end. "You'll remember me" refers to after his death.
2. The first and last verses of the song are different, and not part of the story per se. They are the man saying to the woman, "You'll remember me", and referring to the fields of barley where they spent so much time together as a memory she could draw upon to connect with him in feeling even after he is gone.

Making the beginning and ending "timeless". When I saw that the first and last verses were not part of the story, but a reference to the timeless connection between the two, even beyond death, it struck me that, for this reason, the first and last verses should be done differently musically: they should have a haunting, timeless feeling, and suggest a meeting place in feeling, outside of ordinary time and space.

So that is why the musical arrangement for the opening and closing verses is so different. There is no percussion, the melodies are simplified, the words are sung as though in a vast chamber or space, and the words are chanted in the manner of a prayer or invocation — because that is what it is: the means by which the woman is bringing the man back to life and her, in feeling.

The fact that these timeless verses open and close the song suggested further musical ideas to me. In the opening verse, if you listen closely, you'll hear the man's voice get increasingly stronger and present, as she succeeds in "manifesting" him. Just so, in the last verse, the reverse happens: his voice fades out.

One further change: Sting has the words in the final verse be in past tense: "when we walked in fields of gold". Because I wanted the first and last verses to not just be about her memories of him, but about her actually connecting with him spiritually, I made the words in the opening and closing verses be identical, and in the present tense: "as we walk in fields of gold".

Adding a new verse. One thing I found odd about Sting's version was that the death of the man is strongly implied, but not actually spelled out. To me, the song is a very happy one — they have a wonderful love relationship — with a single dilemma: like all relationships, even the most wonderful, there is an inevitable ending, in this case, by death. And the "solution" suggested by the song (in the first and last verses) is to re-connect with each others' spirits in feeling, triggered by the powerful memories of their times together in the fields of gold. So since this was what I understood the focus of the song to be, it could only be aided by actually adding a verse that explicitly spelled that out:

Then there came the day
When you said goodbye
As I lay in fields of barley
And my soul kissed yours
As you shed your tears
Among the fields of gold.

Earlier in the song is a line, "as we lie in fields of gold". Here the line becomes "as I lay in fields of barley" because now it is his dead body lying in the field as she says goodbye to him.

Removing the bridge verse. I've described a simple structure for the song: it is the story of a beautiful love relationship, with only one issue — death — which is resolved by using the fields of gold for the lovers' spirits to re-connect in feeling.

The only thing that complicates this view of the song is Sting's bridge:

I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold

Here the lyrics go off on what feels to me like a sidetrack about commitment, which unnecessarily brings up bad memories as well (the broken promises). So I decided to just remove the bridge. I had added a new verse, and removing the bridge kept the song at about the same length.

Fields of Gold as a chant. Of course, the bridge was the only section with different music from the verses. Removing it would mean the song would musically be verse after verse from beginning to end, with no change-up in the music. With some songs, that would be intolerably boring. But the music of the verse in Fields of Gold is very beautiful, very interesting, and circular: the end of one verse very naturally feeds into the beginning of the next verse. The complete song is not that long. I decided I could make the arrangement interesting enough that no one would get bored by the repeating verses. So for that reason, in the latter half of the song, I accompany the verses with a choral arrangement that starts with a single voice, then grows to two voices, and finally three voices:

The final thing to say about this: there is a form of music that repeats the same verse over and over without being boring: it's called a chant. It's used by spiritual traditions to hold and absorb the singers' attention, and through repetition, gradually be drawn into a deeper state of consciousness. That is one of my intentions with my version of this song: to use the repetition of the verses to draw the listener into an altered state of consciousness. And to keep the music interesting and mesmerizing so it does this rather than put the listener to sleep through boredom! I'm greatly assisted by Sting's talent at mesmerizing listeners through artful repetition. He does this in Every Breath You Take, which repeats the same guitar riff and melody over and over. And he does this in Fields of Gold, with its hynoptic verse melody, and the repetition of the phrases, "fields of barley" and "fields of gold" over and over again (which I continue to repeat in my new verse).

That "sun in his jealous sky". I like to write and sing songs whose meanings are fairly clear. I'm all for poetry with multiple meanings, when those multiple meanings are intended. But I don't like lyrics whose meanings are so ambiguous that many listeners won't have any clue as to their meaning. In this song, the repeating phrase, "the sun in his jealous sky" is one of those ambiguous phrases. It could mean many things, and I think most people listening to the song basically ignore that phrase because they can't make heads or tails of it.

My own sense of the phrase (which fits with my sense of the song altogether) is that "the sky" is a reference to the "gods" in the heavens, the powers that be, that are "jealous" for the souls of human beings, in the sense that they ensure every human life will end sooner or later. The sun, in that "jealous sky", is the god who marks the passage of time. He does this through the daily cycle (with his rise and his setting) and on the scale of a human life (as it rises and sets). Sting's reference to the sun in "see the children run as the sun goes down" resonates with that interpretation.

So with that interpretation in mind, I got rid of all the mysterious "sun in his jealous sky" references, and replaced them with more direct and obvious references to time and the "setting sun": "You'll forget the time and the setting sun as we walk in fields of gold." "We'll forget the rise and the fall of sun as we lie in fields of gold."

Two small things. In Sting's original lyrics are these lines:

See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley

What's that "so" doing at the end of the line? My guess is that what Sting had in mind was "See the west wind move so like a lover". But that didn't fit the melody, so he moved "so" to end of the sentence. Because that just sounds a little odd to me, I changed the line to:

See the west wind move like a lover's arms
Upon the fields of barley.

Final thing: In Sting's version, he repeats the final, instrumental musical phrase seven times! Maybe this had some numerological significance to him. But it just sounded a bit boring to me, so I cut it back to the more usual three times.