SONG: “All Praise Black Ice”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “New Horizons Finds Blue Skies and Water Ice on Pluto”, NASA.gov, 8 Oct 2015, as used in the post “There’s water ice on another planet. Not Mars. Pluto.”
ABSTRACT:
Laryngitis followed by a business trip and here I am, a couple weeks late. I hope the brass section makes up for that.
(Yes, there’s brass in there, somewhere. I really need help mastering these things, but one does what one can in between everything else.)
I basically had all the Philip Glass-ish orchestral tracks down in time to make the deadline, but didn’t have a voice when it came time to do the guitar and vocals. The shifting time signatures between verses and choruses was kind of a fortuitous accident – when I first started diddling around with a song about Pluto, I thought about doing it in 6/8 just for kicks, then somehow got confused about how beats-per-measure were marked, by which time I’d done some arranging in 4/4 and some in a kind of waltz.
I knew early on that it’d have something in the chorus about “black ice,” and might have something vaguely Lovecraftian or cult-y about the words. It wasn’t until I’d put down a guitar track that I managed to get a complete lyric down, with a call and response and words about exploring deep space and setting up camp at the edge of the solar system and using the frozen water of Pluto to do it.
What fun. Marching through infinite void to the near-lightless plains of frozen Pluto.
The fact that the *volcanoes* on Pluto were spewing out ice lava only came out when I was in the middle of writing this all down.
LYRICS
VS1
Keeping watch from
Distant eyes
Calculate the pathways with
Distant eyes
And the sun will fade
Far away
Learning how to stay
Far awayCH
We are spreading like a flame
All praise black ice
From the edge into the nameless
All praise black iceVS 2
It is cold out here
Thirsty skies
Find a home out here
Thirsty skiesCH
From across the thirsty skies
All praise black ice
We lift our vessels high
All praise black iceSOLO
CH
From across the empty skies
All praise black ice
We lift our vessels high
All praise black ice
We are spreading like a flame
All praise black ice
Spinning out into the nameless
All praise black ice
Now, for a November song and picking a penitential cover.