The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

SONG: Visibility

SONG: “Visibility” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Strange fish has a see-through head”, MSNBC/LiveScience, 23 Feb 2009, as used in the post “Barreleye, I can see inside your head.”

ABSTRACT:
This is a song in the form of a conversation between the Barreleye (Macropinna microstoma, the narrator) and Robin (either Triglidae or Turdus migratorius – it’s ambiguous, although the habitat lends itself to the former). Far be it from your humble guildmaster to compare the world of indie pop to the murky depths of the benthic (or bathypelagic) marine environment, but once the idea asserted itself, it was hard to shake. Plus, I promised a third kind of Robin, an indefatigable online booster and social networking maven found here, that I’d write a song for her. Because she deserves songs. Often, when it comes to self-promotion, I feel like the barreleye must feel around other fish. I mean, sea robins have legs, and they’re not half as strange as the guy with the fishtank on his head. Oh, wait, that fishtank is his head. Has he been watching us the whole time? Should we let on that we’ve noticed him?

Robin does not have a fishtank on her head.

I also feel like I should credit Things in Herds because I was sure I stole the hook from a song of theirs, but I just listened to three of their albums (all that I own), and I can’t find the song. I may have imagined it, but don’t think I did. Anyway, their song (or the one my memory made up by them) didn’t have a toy piano playing that hooky part, and probably wasn’t about deep sea creatures or my friend Robin. It also lacked a hulusi and didn’t have percussion made from samples of my 6-year-old daughter’s voice. It may have made its makers as happy as this one made me. Perhaps it did.

Entered on 23 March 2009 at 6:43 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print