SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Science, 1 Aug 19, “The Milky Way is more warped than astronomers thought,” as used in the post “Our galaxy is warped. Just a little.”
ABSTRACT:
We live in an imperfect universe. I suppose this is the central fact of lo-fi as an aesthetic, the sense of reaching something transcendent through wabi-sabi means. So, of course, the idea that our universe is not geometrically perfect, but a little wonky, a bit S-curved, like a weighed-down sapling or an LP left in a hot car, I’m here for it. Records spin with a spiral groove, and galaxies spin too. And if you use a radio telescope to listen, you even pick up background hiss.
So the subject here seemed pretty much on the nose. (I hadn’t realized the research was from 2019 until preparing to post it online, but I don’t care. That’s how on the nose it is.)
Recording was smooth enough. I’d actually spent a lot of time this month working on a song – or the music part of a song – that I want to use for something else, collaborating with a friend of mine. It was sort of hard to pull my head out of that melody and into another one, so I started this song off with the four-chord outro of that other song, then cut the tempo in half (played each chord twice, in other words), and made it a minimal acoustic plong-pling-plong-pling thing instead of a chunk-chunk-chunk grungy march that it was.
And then it took a life of its own. I got worried about time to actually record guitar, so the audio you’re hearing is actually two tracks of the same take of acoustic – one recorded on the laptop mic, one recorded on my phone – blended together. Same with the squonky electric lead riff, except that has all kinds of fuzz effects on it. I also fuzzed the bass on the chorus to fatten things up and added a mellotron.
I’ve noticed that for some reason, purely unconsciously, I always want to make songs about deep-space phenomena have quiet-loud-quiet dynamics with lots of huge-sounding crunchiness in the louder parts. Even when I want the lyrics to be kind of soft and reflective.
The lyrics I took a little more time with than usual. They did not all fall into place immediately. I think as an exercise here, I’ll try to write down a little of that process below.
First, the words as they were sung:
LYRICS
Brown and brittle, but still alive
Like last season’s orange rindLeft to dry up
in the spiraling suns
In infinityWe are not on fire here
Inside the eggshell of a celestial sphereBeneath these spinning skies
Like vinyl on the backseat
warps where it lies-> Curling at the edges
A nucleus and halo, bending
Are angels hiding their twisted grins?Like octopus arms
Hungry reaching
for something outsideAnd every world we see
Is warping under the weight of it all,A greenwood hiker’s bridge
A winding creek, a waiting snake, it’s-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
Momentum and gravity cleanse
The stars they shape into lensesThe perfect spiral face
With something out of placeSo how could I be any better?
Measured and mapped
With standard candlesOur empty hours
Crumple like paper flowers
Like paper flowers-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
(the edges curl)
OK, that’s how they are in the song.
To start with, I had basically a full music treatment with soaring, noisy choruses and introspective, plinky verses, and an idea that this was about living in a galaxy which was curling at the edges.
OK, there’s an image: curling at the edges. That was the first chorus, and I stuck with it (for good or ill).
Then, what I did was write down a free-verse poem based around that imagery – it had to be about the curling, but not with a sense of burning up or decomposition.
It started as a not-bad poem, but got murky fairly quickly. Tossing in terms from an astronomy glossary didn’t really help much:
FIRST DUMP
Brown and brittle
Like last season’s orange peel
Left to dry up in the sun
As hard as a crab’s shell
Under a hammer
Or the beak of a spiraling octopus.These luminous arms will not spare us
The pressure of spinning –
Will not pause for our breath…
You, me, and the calendar,
A blur of days, a black-and-white clock face
In a mid-century modernist montageCurling at the edges
Our hair and nails
keep growing long after I’ve forgotten.
The boundary keeps shifting,
Bending with our weight,
A greenwood hiker’s bridge
Vinyl on the dashboard
I remember something like that
But the details get fuzzyCurling at the edges
Momentum and gravity
And bodies in fusion
Are not flattening
Who could have expected
A sky made of falling leaves
The skin tight across our backs
We did not ask for this path
The way is winding
The burning blinding
Mass in a vacuum
The empty hours
Crumple themselves like paper hereCurling at the edges
Fire is not the problem here
The eggshell of a celestial sphere
A nucleus and halo
A nucleus and halo, bending
The glossary terms, like “standard candles” and “celestial sphere” and “nucleus and halo” didn’t help much there, yes, but I liked either the sound or the associations from all of them.
So I started humming the melody while chopping this out and moving this up, trying to find phrases in words that could fit phrases in music. Some lines I could get anything to fit, so I left X’s or bits of syncopated nonsense like Morse code.
I also tried to make verses more symmetrical and maybe thin out the multitude of images into only three or four metaphors:
HUMMING REVISION
Brown and brittle, but still alive
Like last season’s orange rindLeft to dry up
in the spiraling sunsWe are not on fire here
Inside the eggshell
celestial sphereBeneath these spinning skies
Like vinyl on the backseat
It warps where it lies-> Curling at the edges
A nucleus and halo, bending
Like octopus arms
Hungry for something outsideXX xx xxx
Could only be in
Every world we seeAnd every world we see
Is bending under everyone’s weight,
A greenwood hiker’s bridge
A dat dat striking daa-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
Momentum and gravity cleanses
The stars they shape into lensesThe perfect spiral face
With something out of placeHow could I be any better?
Measured and mapped
With standard candlesOur empty hours
Crumple like paper flowers
Like paper flowers-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
Somewhere in there, the idea of having a counter-chorus snuck in. OK, the edges curl. Part of that I think was lampshading – I’m still not sure about the idea of “curling” being right for the idea I want to get across (it’s a silly word), so I decided to double down on it. If it makes you think of sliding stones across ice or people making twisty shapes with their tongues, oh well.
The verb “striking” in the dat-dit-daa Morse code bit didn’t fit with any imagery, but it made me think of a snake, a rattlesnake. I liked the hiker’s bridge still (which was a thought that came out of nowhere in the previous phase, an image of a narrow, springy length of green wood a person could use to not entirely safely cross a small ravine).
I quite liked the final verse at this point. Hadn’t even noticed the “cleanses/lenses” rhyme was based on bad grammar – is it one thing doing the cleansing or two things?
So next, I spent a long while with headphones on and the lyrics on my lap, muttering the words as I listened to the verses and seeing what absolutely didn’t fit, what was a stretch, and what had to go:
MUTTERING REVISION
Brown and brittle, but still alive
Like last season’s orange rindLeft to dry up
in the spiraling sunsWe are not on fire here
Inside the eggshell of our celestial sphereBeneath these spinning skies
Like vinyl on the backseat
warps where it lies-> Curling at the edges
A nucleus and halo, bending
Are angels hiding their twisted grins?Like octopus arms
Hungry reaching
for something outsideAnd every world we see
Is warping under the weight of us all,A greenwood hiker’s bridge
A winding creek, a waiting snake-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
Momentum and gravity cleanses
The stars they shape into lensesThe perfect spiral face
With something out of placeSo how could I be any better?
Measured and mapped
With standard candlesOur empty hours
Crumple like paper flowers
Like paper flowers-> Curling at the edges (the edges curl)
(the edges curl)
This minimized the hungry octopus bit (which I was a little sad to cut out, since the idea of seeing the galaxy as a stylized octopus could have led somewhere interesting if I extended it through the whole song), and brought the halo close to the angels, which seemed to resonate more with the celestial sphere idea, too. I liked the halo being bent and the sphere being really more egg-shaped (which is scientifically accurate, I think – what we see in the night sky is more of ellipse than a sphere, from what I remember… I hope correctly). There’s also something faintly Lovecraftian about having the angels with twisted grins show up before the hungry octopus. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m doing this mostly for me anyway, right? I’m the first audience member.
The remaining changes – “cleanses” to “cleanse,” the source of the weight (“of it all” sounds more galactic), an “it’s” before the second chorus that just seemed to fit, and the extension of the counter-chorus into the outro – all happened after I sang a few takes and started editing vocals.
So that’s a look at the writing process. In most other songs, if I’d written a last verse that I liked as much as this one, I’d have moved it to the first verse, but I really wanted to end with paper flowers and start with the dried-up orange peel, which is something I remember from childhood – finding husks of old orange halves gone totally hard and shell-like after a couple of months in the sun. Start with something true, Paul Simon says. Well, there it is. Even fresh fruit gets warped and weird after a little time in this universe.