John M Davis

‘The Fisher King’ is a musical journey through our culture and society in the year 2025 framed in an old tale fraught with hubris, ignorance, misunderstanding but in the end heroism and hope.

‘The Fisher King’ is a journey through our culture and society in the year 2025 framed in an old tale of fraught with hubris, ignorance, and misunderstanding but in the end heroism and hope.

I started working on what eventually became ‘The Fisher King’ in March of 2025. My original intent was to create some moody, post-apocalyptic music. Think ‘Fallout’ or ‘Book of Eli’ or that old video game ‘Wasteland’. That idea fell apart pretty quickly because as things progressed, I found that the idea, while fun, wasn’t really saying anything of worth. Our particular political moment in the US was in full swing and anything that didn’t somehow address that felt like a waste of effort.

‘Waste Land’ was going to be the name of the album and I was searching for inspiring references when I remembered T. S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. I’m not silly enough to think Eliot wrote a Mad Max poem but I did feel the need to at least read it and if I’m really lucky (this is Eliot after all) maybe understand it. So I started doing what I often do and embarked on a long strange trip starting with T. S. Eliot, through the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and finally the Welsh Mabinogian. There was an amusing side trip via Tim Powers’ novel “The Drawing of the Dark” but that was a fun summer read.

Anyway, somewhere along the way, I hit on the story of the Fisher King. That story surprised me in the way that it clarified what I wanted to say with this record and at the same time became the perfect metaphor to express it.

The Fisher King story centers around a king who suffered from a grievous, probably magical, though apparently non-fatal, injury. As long as his chronic condition continued his lands and the people in them would be sick, poor, and starving. A hero was required to heal the Fisher King and by extension heal his lands. I read a few versions of this tale but the text I was most drawn to was the Welsh tale ‘Peredur son of Efrog’ from the Mabinogian. Peredur had many adventures but a large portion of his tale centers on the Fisher King.

In that story, Peredur—young, impetuous, and perhaps slightly dim—came to the Fisher King’s court looking for a place to stay the night. That evening during dinner, our hero was shown amazing sights in the Fisher King’s court: among other things, a silver platter and a spear that leaked blood from its tip. In later versions of the Fisher King story, the platter is replaced by a silver cup and ultimately, the Holy Grail, but I digress.

It’s a surreal scene but due to his chivalric training, Peredur was too polite to grill his host about these weird and wondrous things. Really, all Peredur had to do was ask about the items and how they related to the King. By doing so he would have broken the spell and freed the wounded monarch from his condition. Sadly, because Peredur was too polite to ask questions, the opportunity was lost. After leaving the Fisher King’s court, Peredur happened upon a young woman in the forest who explained to him how badly he f-ed up and how the road to healing the Fisher King would now be a long and arduous one indeed. Long story short, Peredur did embark on a long series of adventures and through his many deeds healed the king and his lands. Happy ending but there was a lot of bloodshed along the way.

As I reflected on all of this and in discussion with people way smarter than me, I realized that we are all Peredur in a way. Our lands our sick, between climate change, political upheaval, and cultural divide there is something really wrong. We are all Peredur in that we let this happen. Many of us didn’t ask enough questions. We chose to be polite (or just complacent) and stay silent until finally someone stopped us in the woods and said, “things are really f-ed up.” Then, we finally listened.

In many ways, we are all the Fisher King as well. There is no single King to be healed but there is our climate, our people, and our culture. We know things are messed up but we don’t seem to have the ability to fix it ourselves. We act like we need someone else to do it for us. We can fix things though. Through a long series of small actions we can heal the Fisher King and the land and maybe, together, get to a better, more peaceful place.

That’s the journey I took while making this album. It began with a need to express that things are really terrible. I think my original idea was rather defeatist when I started by envisioning a world already in ruin. In Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’, he references the Fisher King in his last stanza. Eliot’s Fisher King found the wherewithal to set things right, to rebuild a world devestated by the grievous cultural and political errors that led to World War I. It’s a message of hope really. In the end it’s a message that things can be set right. The land and its people can be healed. It requires action and more than a little heroism. If this little record of instrumental music has any meaning at all, then that would be it.

‘The Fisher King’ will be released on January 6th, 2026 on Bandcamp and everywhere else on January 16th. You can also listen to the whole thing right here for free:

If you want to throw me some support, there’s always Bandcamp (believe me, I’d appreciate the support).