Video hit Sting

Sting - In Darkness Let Me Dwell

Songs from the Labyrinth is a 2006 album of recordings of the music of John Dowland by Sting and Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov.

The album was released and re-released in several versions: LP vinyl and CD editions with 23 tracks, a CD/DVD edition with 8 tracks on the CD and a DVD documentary, The Journey and the Labyrinth (released in both "CD size" and "DVD size" packaging), and a CD re-release with 26 tracks (including live versions of Sting's own "Fields of Gold" and "Message in a Bottle", originally recorded with The Police).

In late August 2013, a "Dowland Anniversary Edition" was released, which includes 32 tracks on one CD (the full original album, six live versions of album tracks and Sting's non-Dowland live songs), as well as a DVD with the original documentary.

For the original CD program, the music was composed by John Dowland except for "Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow", a song by Dowland's contemporary Robert Johnson.

The 2008 re-release adds two live recordings of Sting-penned songs performed on lutes, as well as a live recording, in the same style, of "Hellhound on My Trail" by another Robert Johnson - the Delta blues musician, and an alternate version of "Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow".

The latter is omitted from the 2013 "Dowland Anniversary Edition" of the album, which, however, includes all of the live recordings.

The track list includes readings from a letter by Dowland to Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury.

The lyrics to many of Dowland's songs are anonymous.

The lyrics:

In darkness let me dwell; the ground shall sorrow be,

The roof despair, to bar all cheerful light from me;

The walls of marble black, that moist'ned still shall weep;

My music, hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep.

Thus, wedded to my woes, and bedded in my tomb,

O let me dying live, till death doth come, till death doth come.

In darkness let me dwell