SONG: “Heaven is Our Home”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE:Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months,” The Guardian, 13 Oct 2017, as used in the post “Tiangong-1 is falling to Earth.”
ABSTRACT:
I appear to have killed my laptop. The very last thing I did on it, with a screen twice as bright as normal and no spacebar, backspace, or letters “g” or “x” – was finish a vocal track last night and load the song into this site. (Amazing what you can manage by cutting and pasting characters…) This morning, all I get is half a white screen.
I probably would have made a drum track (lots of 16th notes), put in some radio chatter or telemetry sounds at the end, and maybe some pads or a keyboard noise to emphasize that chromatic scale falling down at the beginning of each line. That was important – the falling down thing.
But my lunch leaked in my satchel and I lost two TapeOps and the functionality of my very old laptop. It’s from 2004, you know.
Alas.
So all this is is a vocal track and three guitar tracks – two faking a single guitar part, another solo at the end.
“Tiangong-1 is falling to Earth” might be a better name for this song, but it turned while I was writing it. Suddenly, this was more about why we build space stations rather than what happens to them when they go wrong. The ambition, but more than that – the feeling that humans go up there because somehow we belong up there. It’s way harder than it should be, isn’t it?
“Tiangong” literally means “Heaven Palace” – which I suppose would be the mythical home of the Jade Emperor and all the immortals.
The wax is melting in the first verse because of Icarus; the archer in the second verse is Hou Yi, who shot down 9 suns, and who is married to Chang-O, the mournful lady in the moon.
Watch the skies.
LYRICS:
The wax is always melting
When we reach toward the sun
All the towers we have built on sand
The palace walls undone.Heaven is our home
But with conditionsBring us archers with their wistful wives
Have them aim beyond the air
Bring us builders with their tin can plans
Trust with our lives up there.Heaven is our home
But with conditions