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She Sells Sanctuary: There is more here than a great guitar riff

Edward Schooley
Posted: September 28, 2026
Sanctuary doesn't necessarily have to be a physical place. Sometimes sanctuary is another person. - Guitar Thrills Magazine


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EDITOR IN CHIEF | GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE TAMPA, FL U.S.A.

Edward Schooley

Founded in 2021. GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE of Tampa, FL Guitar Thrills Magazine of Tampa, FL U.S.A. The GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE is excited to bring you some of the music industries finest talent. Including the world of entertainment. Our focus includes the long term goals and aspirations of artists of all sorts. We are an unbiased reporting platform. You are getting insight into the world of music. No, we are not your fathers website for music news. We have grown into our own, and rely upon decades of music experience and knowledge. Guitar Thrills Magazine is a hard act to follow.

There are songs we hear, enjoy, and eventually forget. Then there are songs that somehow attach themselves to us. We may not understand why at the time, and we may not even realize the significance of the song until years have passed. Then it comes through the speakers again and something about it feels familiar in a way that has nothing to do with the recording itself. The Cult's “She Sells Sanctuary” has always been one of those songs for me.

I've listened to this song for decades, and I have never felt the need to decide exactly what it is supposed to mean. That isn't really why I listen to music. As Editor in Chief of Guitar Thrills Magazine, I've spent an enormous amount of time listening to songs, reading lyrics, reviewing music, and trying to understand why certain songs stay with us while others disappear almost immediately. The answer isn't always found in what the artist intended. Sometimes it is found in what the song awakens in the person listening to it.

That is what I hear in “She Sells Sanctuary.” I hear a relationship between a man and a woman, but not necessarily a perfect relationship. I hear a woman with strength, a woman who has lived through things, who carries her own experiences, her own good moments and bad ones. There is vulnerability there too, and perhaps that is part of what makes her so compelling. She represents a place where someone can go and simply exist for a while, without having to explain everything that came before.

Sanctuary doesn't necessarily have to be a physical place. Sometimes sanctuary is another person.

I've known women who could create that feeling without ever saying they were doing it. There was something about them that made you want to remain in their presence. Sometimes it was their confidence, sometimes their personality, and sometimes it was something much harder to explain.

Their eyes.

We talk about eye color as though that tells us everything. Blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, hazel eyes, gray eyes. Certainly, color can have an effect on how we perceive someone, and people are naturally going to respond differently to different shades and shapes. But after knowing enough people, you realize that eye color isn't really the thing you remember. It's what those eyes did to you.

There are women whose eyes you simply don't forget. I've known women who understood that they possessed that particular quality and knew how to engage people with it. They didn't have to be perfect. In fact, they weren't. None of us are. But there could be something in the way they looked at you that pulled you in. You could be having an ordinary conversation and suddenly find yourself paying more attention to her eyes than anything else she was saying.

That is the fire I hear in this song.

Fire doesn't have to mean anger. It can mean desire, confidence, warmth, curiosity, compassion, or something that you can't quite identify. A woman can have fire in her eyes and you may never know exactly what you're seeing. Is it lust? Is it hope? Is it pain? Is it happiness? Is she remembering something? Is she thinking about what might happen next? Sometimes the mystery is part of the attraction.

If you have ever looked into the eyes of someone you were deeply attracted to, you know there are moments when you can get lost there. You begin imagining possibilities that seem to exist in that particular moment. You can become lost in love, lost in belief, lost in what could happen, or even lost in what has already happened and cannot be recovered. Maybe that is part of what makes certain people so difficult to forget. Their eyes leave an impression that has nothing to do with whether the relationship ultimately worked.

This is where my own history enters the song. I can think back to certain women I've known and remember the one thing about them that made them unforgettable. It wasn't always their beauty or their personality. Sometimes it was simply the way they looked at me. Years later, the song can bring that feeling back, not because I am trying to recreate the past, but because music has a way of connecting words and sound to experiences that mattered.

That is why I don't believe there is one definitive interpretation of a song like “She Sells Sanctuary.” One person hears a great rock song with an incredible guitar riff. Another hears a song about desire or escape. Someone else hears freedom, spirituality, or the need to find somewhere safe in an otherwise chaotic world. I hear a woman, and I hear the complicated emotional territory that exists between attraction, vulnerability, hope, and the possibility of finding somewhere you belong.

Many listeners get caught up in the chorus, and there is nothing wrong with that. The chorus is often the major reason we remember a song. It's catchy, familiar, and usually hits a particular note with the listener. But sometimes the chorus is only the most obvious part of the experience. If you stop there, you may miss what the words are capable of doing once you start applying them to your own life.

That is something Guitar Thrills has taken seriously in our reviews. We have broken songs down at nauseam, not because we believe there is always some hidden answer waiting to be uncovered, but because we believe music deserves to be examined. Much of what we write comes from our own experiences upon hearing a song. Honestly, what else is music supposed to do? We hear words and music, and we connect them to something we have lived.

As Editor in Chief, I have come to believe that the great songs almost always find their way back to nostalgia, romance, love gained, love lost, or the possibility of something that never quite happened. That's not a limitation of music. It's one of its greatest strengths. A song can remain exactly the same while the person listening to it changes completely. The words that meant one thing years ago can suddenly fit another part of your life, another relationship, or another person.

The song stays where it was.

We move.

There is another issue I have with the way music was presented to us, particularly during the years when music videos were such an important part of the culture. Music videos could be powerful, but sometimes they became an injustice to the song itself. A video could take a song in a completely different direction, and for listeners who weren't looking any deeper, the visual became the meaning. People were buying records and CDs based partly on what they were seeing, and sometimes what they saw had very little to do with what the artist was actually saying through the music.

That mattered to those of us who were looking for the poetry in music.

I say “musical intrigue” lightly when talking about those who were satisfied with nothing more than a beat to feed their interest. There is nothing wrong with enjoying a beat, a chorus, or a great guitar riff. That's part of why we listen. But there is another level available when you actually sit with the words and allow them to connect with something beyond the immediate pleasure of the music.

Maybe someone.

Maybe somewhere.

Maybe a version of yourself that you haven't seen in a long time.

And that's where “She Sells Sanctuary” continues to work on me. I don't hear it simply as an old Cult song. I hear the emotional possibilities in it. I hear the woman with the fire in her eyes, the attraction that can make you forget what you're supposed to be thinking about, and the idea that another person can sometimes become the place where you feel most comfortable being vulnerable.

There are people who will read this and think I'm reading far too much into a rock song. That's fine. I'm not writing this to convince them otherwise. I'm writing it because this is what the song has become for me, and I suspect there are other listeners who understand exactly what I'm talking about.

They know.

They know what it is to hear a song and have a person suddenly come to mind. They know what it is to hear a lyric years after first discovering it and realize that life has given the words an entirely different meaning. They know what it is to look into someone's eyes and recognize something they couldn't explain at the time, only to understand later why that moment stayed with them.

Those are the listeners I'm writing for.

The Cult recorded “She Sells Sanctuary.” What we do with it afterward is our own business. We attach our experiences to it, our relationships, our disappointments, our hopes, and occasionally the people we were lucky enough to know.

Maybe that is what sanctuary really is. Not necessarily a place to hide, but a place where, for a little while, you don't have to explain yourself. Sometimes you find it in another person. Sometimes you find it in a song.

And sometimes, decades later, you hear that song again and realize you never really left.

PRS Standard 24 Review from Guitar Thrills Magazine Tampa, FL The World of Rock and Blues Magazine.

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