Fingers In The Wounds

Album: The Mandrake Project (2024)
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Songfacts®:

  • Bruce Dickinson loads up this song with religious imagery, evoking Jesus' miracles. What's it all about? He explained in a Songfacts track by track:

    "What if Jesus came back and he was an internet influencer? How would we deal with that? Nobody would take him seriously as the messiah unless he had so many millions of followers. I thought that was a nice way to poke fun at internet influencers.

    Hence, lines like, 'There's not enough gold at the end of your rope,' and things like that. 'Your life is a zero, you only can be what the people they see. Put your fingers in the wounds and pray that it's God. A roll of the dice for a piece of his cloth.'

    'You're an internet influencer! Oh my God, you're God! I'll put my fingers through the iPhone and you can be God and we'll believe you.' And it's worthless. It's junk."
  • With his band Iron Maiden, Dickinson made religious comparisons on the 1990 track "Holy Smoke," which deals with shady televangelists. Looking back, he sees those threats as quaint. "To me, the internet is far more of a threat to society," he told Songfacts. "Social media is far more a threat to society and humanity than Jerry Falwell ever was."
  • Dickinson wrote this song with Roy Z, an American guitarist who is his longtime collaborator. It's part of his album The Mandrake Project, which Roy Z produced.

    The album is accompanied by a 12-episode comic of the same name. The two projects aren't directly linked but do share artwork and some concepts.

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