SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Charles A. A. Dellschau Dreams of Flying: The Amazing Story of an Airship Club That Might Never Have Existed,” The Atlantic, 21 March 2013, as used in the post “Science Art: Plate 2527 Guarda (a mechanism for protecting airships), by Charles A.A. Dellschau, 1912.”
ABSTRACT:
Writer’s block is a boring thing.
So.
Here’s a thing you can do: take whatever it is that’s distracting you and turn that thing into something else that you can use. Play a game of transformations. (I’m pretty sure Brian Eno should get credit for this.) This song here is the result of a double transformation – a song that had earwormed itself so thoroughly into my brain that I couldn’t get a damn thing done. So instead, I just changed the words. Then changed the chords. Then recorded it.
Gold star if you can figure out the original. It’s kind of obvious to me, still, but I’m not sure it’d be apparent to someone who didn’t know what was going on.
This also marks the first time, I think, that one of the songs on here has been based on one of the Science Art pieces rather than actual research – but since the art in question came from people trying to figure out if the Sonora Aero Club ever existed, then it’s kind of research in its own right.
Now, for a penitential cover.
Lyrics (for your guessing pleasure):
Aeronaut, come
Let me fill your glass
The seasons have passed
Once the master of masts
I will hear as you plan out your craftLook back and share what you saw
Look back and share what you saw….Aeronaut, come
Put on your Sunday suit
And lecture the room on dirigible schemes
With the cages that swing through our dre-eams
Sket-ches glide through the sky
Sket-ches glide through the sky
We will cast off our lines
And we’ll be catching updrafts,
Rudders in your old and calloused hands
And gravity is
Breaking every bone your body tries to hold inside
Once the wind begins to rise
Aeronaut, come
With ductwork and weights
Create me an aileron assembly just for us
Our gondola is slung beneath the struts
Blueprints swiftly ascend
Silk threads sparkle and bend
Bygone lovers and friends,
fall like feathers on your face
And your old and calloused hands will be waving off our weights
Breaking every bone
you held inside
Watching your climb
Aeronaut, come
Do not look back to mourn
The world you have borne
In your gold silken forms
To support those mockingbirds
Heaping scorn.
Cast off and leap to the skies
Spirals of white softly rise
Past mustachioed lips
and all the things you say you did
Will set beside the sun
when you finally take flight
And every eye will rise…
In the dying of the light.