Songfacts®:

• Originally written during the 1993 Laid sessions but not used, the demo was rediscovered three years later and recorded for the Whiplash album.
• The song details a man who wanders off into Lake District and lies down into the snow to die. Frontman Tim Booth recalled to Artist Direct how the lyrics came true in very strange and eerie way.
  
  "I wrote the lyric in a jam and then a year later I completed the lyrics and as we mixed the song, as it got ready for release, my friend I was living with at the time, her mentor literally went off in the Lake District laid down in the snow and committed suicide in that way. hey played that song at his funeral before it was released and his wife rang me up to ask me how I knew her husband."
• The song title is a play on the biblical phrase "green pastures" used by David in Psalm 23. ("The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not be in want, He makes me lie down in green pastures") Unlike the restoring green pastures, that the Psalmist speaks of, the titular "blue pastures" is an unhappy place where the subject of the song lies down to die.
• The American Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Mary Oliver published a collection of prose and poetry titled Blue Pastures in 1995.