Broken Wings

Album: Resurrection (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Anasticia's Resurrection LP marked her return to music after battling breast cancer for a second time. She closes the album with this poignant track, where she references her beautiful scars.

    "Speaking about the hard times helps me," Anastacia told The Daily Mail. "Being vulnerably honest brings me past them. 'I don't necessarily want everyone knowing about the road maps all over my body, but I choose to write songs and talk about the wings of an angel being replaced by my beautiful scars. It's just the way I see it."
  • Anastacia's cancer surgery involved tissue taken from the lateral muscles in her back to construct new breasts. "I have wings tattooed on my back, and the scars sit just beneath them," she told Mail on Sunday's You magazine. "That's where the words for my song 'Broken Wings' come from. I was able to write amazing songs based on the experience; the entire Resurrection album was inspired by cancer."
  • The phrase 'Broken Wings' have been used by several songwriters to describe somebody who is wounded either physically or emotionally. Often, they are urged in the song to pick up the pieces of their life and fly away. The original 'Broken Wings' was a poetic novel written by the Lebanese poet-philosopher Kahlil Gibran. First published in Arabic in 1912, it is a tragic story of a love that is doomed by social convention, set in turn-of-the-century Beirut.

    Other artists that have recorded songs about broken wings include Bleed The Dream, Flyleaf and most famously Mr. Mister. The lyric, "Take these broken wings and learn to fly" also features in The Beatles 1968 track "Blackbird."

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