Do you know the Fisher King? No, not the film with Robin Williams.
The Arthurian legend. The one about the guy who’s supposed to guard the holy grail. But he gets wounded and the land begins to die — so he waits and waits to be healed.
Well, in my version, that wound is the guilt of having inflicted a wound on someone else — and basically the song is asking, how do you heal from something like that?
🏆🐟
We recorded Fisher King mostly live in a beautiful house on the Oregon coast overlooking the Lewis & Clark Salt Works. Same as every song on my album The Great Make Believer.
I don’t have footage from that song session, but here’s the exact same group of people doing a live take once we were back home in Portland, recorded by my friend Peter Rodocker:
THE PEOPLE
Anders Bergstrom on drums
Paul Brainard on pedal steel
Arthur Parker on bass
Bob Dunham on electric guitar
And Naomi Hooley and Rob Stroup on backup vocals
Rob Stoup also produced and engineered the studio version during those beach sessions.
Gotta give a special shoutout to Anders for that weird hypnotic drum groove. I think he put some kinda coffee beans in a JC Penny dress-shirt box? Sorta gave it a drum-machine feel, played by a soulful human.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit to stealing some inspiration for the guitar part from both Paul Simon’s Hearts & Bones and the Harry Nilsson version of Everybody’s Talkin’.
Here’s that guitar part and voice alone, in a hotel room in Kansas City:
LYRICS
Have you heard the tale of the king
Who was wounded by some betrayal
And how wasting away in the darkness he guards the grail
While everything good seems to fade
Despite all the plans that he’d made
But he won’t let it go or forgive
The one awful thing that he most needs to live
Well, he’s empty and cold
But at least he’s got the cup
And his fisher king wound is the thing he won’t give up
Now I’ve heard it said so much it sounds cliché
That you can’t know true love until you have thrown it away
Now that I’ve broken your heart
Now that I’ve torn us apart
Do I want you back ‘cause you’re gone?
Do I want you back ‘cause you’re moving on?
I thought we were through, but now I feel it too,
How my fisher king wound is the one I gave to you
If you know that inside me there’s doubt and fear and pain
Then I’m guessing for you it’s probably the same
Well, I know we both were betrayed
The moment I first felt afraid
That something so strong can’t be true
So to hide from myself and from you, I withdrew
Now my fisher king wound’s the kind I can’t conceal
‘cause I feel it cut deeper the more that your heart heals
And I thought we were through but now I feel it too
How my fisher king wound was the one I gave to you
