SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: “Water on Venus was stripped away by ‘electric wind’,” Wired, 21 June 2016, as used in the post “The electric wind left Venus without water or air.”
ABSTRACT: So, I’ve just found the researcher’s personal site, on which he describes himself as “Scientist, Space Cadet and Singer-Songwriter.” So, you know, maybe he’ll understand all this. On the other hand, his band is on Facebook as ‘DC’s hottest English ceilidh, contra dance and party band,” with what appears to be proper musicians and everything, so maybe we’re on different worlds after all.
Anyway, with a name like “The Electric Wind,” it seems like a song should sound more like either Blue Oyster Cult (circa Secret Treaties) or Laurie Anderson. Instead, I made a Melvins-meets-Stan Ridgway thing. The harmonica turned out better than I expected.
And man, I love basses. Despite what it sounds like, everything you hear on this that isn’t voice, harmonica or drums is a bass. Big and crunchy or pitch-bent into a lead guitar. All bass.
If I wasn’t writing lyrics based on a story I only read yesterday, they’d probably be a little less… uh… obviously stolen from other places. I think this might be the first time I’ve ever used a direct quote from a source article in one of these songs. I guess it’s obvious the guy doing the science is a songwriter himself.
LYRICS:
We took the express
and rode it to Venus
watching the weather
the distance between usThis is not a love song
It’s about acid rain
About whirlwinds of sulfur
Across distant plains
(D) It could happen again…The electric wind
Steals the breath from our lungsThe electric wind
…Lets us burn in the sun
The electric windInvisible hands
Tearing the sky
Boiling the oceans
Leaving us dryDon’t ask the wrong questions
Don’t ask why, but when…
Interrogate hope
In case it happens again(D) In case it happens again…
The electric wind
…Takes the words from our tongues
The electric wind
…Lets us burn in the sun[spoken BR]
“It’s amazing, shocking,” said Glyn Collinson, a scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. “We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars.
“We found that the electric wind, which people thought was just one small cog in a big machine, is in fact this big monster that’s capable of sucking the water from Venus by itself,”—
We came out to the big sky country looking for someplace that looked like home, someplace that looked like we could settle down, build a future and be together. What we found wasn’t that. The things that you could see, like the sun blazing over a desert sky until the stormclouds finally come rolling in – they might want you dead, but at least you could prepare. The things you couldn’t see, though… The hidden pitfall, the mirage on the horizon, the hazy heat lines promising us just one small step further. Just one small step more. Y’all can make it if you just get through this rough patch. But out here, the rough patch was all there was.[harmonica solo]
The electric wind
The electric wind
The electric wind