SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: NASA Press Release, 16 Oct 21, “NASA, ULA Launch Lucy Mission to ‘Fossils’ of Planet Formation,” as used in the post “Lucy is NASA’s mission to find “fossils” in space.”
ABSTRACT:
This song is a couple days late, which sort of frustrates me because it was so close to being done on time but just needed a little more poking and trimming to all fall into place. The music was ready days in advance. I’d put the tracks together a little bit backwards – usually, I’ll start with an idea for a chord progression or bass line, then put a rough drum track down, then some guitars and vocals, and then adorn that with little instrumental ditties, often labeled something like “organ riff” or “guitar diddling.”
This one started with a ukulele riff. The weird thing is, I had no idea the rest of the song would turn out the way it did. I thought it was going to be something in a straight 4/4 power-pop, hard-rock ballad mode. The first thing I did after recording a hasty placeholder riff was put some distortion and filtering on it so it sounded gnarly. Then, I put what I thought might be a bassline down using a duduk Soundfont, followed by some snare drum accents on the 2s and 4s. So far, so standard noisy alt-rock song. (I’ve noticed that songs I write about space tend toward my pathetic indie version of heavy metal. This one, though, would ultimately wind up in a kind of Tin Pan Alley mode that’s what I usually use in paleontology… which fits, I suppose, given Lucy.)
Anyway, the next thing I did was put down a drum track. I set the grid to “swing” timing and used a kit I don’t usually touch – it’s labeled “198 JB KiT” and has little drum rolls where most kits have tuned toms. And somehow that changed everything.
Suddenly, it made sense to speed it up from a plodding 85 bpm to 100 bpm. It started to sound vaguely Latin, like a fado song, but not exactly. What I thought was a bassline was way too unfocused, so I stuck in a “real” bass under it, a super simple two-notes-per-measure line using sounds from a set of NES videogame 8-bit sounds. For some reason, the “piano” in Legend of Zelda sounds a lot like a plucked bass in the lower registers. Only then, after everything else, could I come up with a rhythm guitar part. I put that down and realized, hey, this is a totally different song than I thought it would be. Less Lee Ranaldo, more Django Reinhardt. That was pretty good. Polishing it up: I cut most repetitions of the uke riff right out, and brought back the un-distorted uke track as if the player was hitting a stomp box to turn the effects on (or communicating with another ukulele on a spacecraft radio).
Somewhere in that process, I’d narrowed the subject matter down to a song about either bee fences or the space probe named after the very, very old skeleton. The space probe won out. But the words only came… well, sort of all at once, the way I always hope they do, but about an hour after I’d posted, “There won’t be a song on time this month.” Something about sending the spirit of a long-dead ancestor up to explore asteroids – how would you even explain that to her? And that link between early ancestors and the formation of the matter we know of as our local star and planetary system … that’s really interesting to me. Rocks in the sky, like the desert your bones were found in, great-grandmother.
So. Something about these lyrics and the way the tracks turned out reminded me of Tom Waits, which is usually a good thing, except I can’t sing like him and wouldn’t want to try. But the vocals needed to be blown out, ancient, and exhausted. A little distortion or brokenness would be even better. So I lay in bed – a separate bed from anyone else in the house – at 2:30 in the morning with my laptop on my chest, headphones on my ears, and all the lights out … and I sang the words. I thought that might just be scratch vocals, the track you lay down to record over later with “real” vox. But no, they were broken down and had the right kind of yearning mixed with despair that I was aiming at. Done.
The bright lights that seem so hopeful up above are mostly just more of that hard stuff we’re walking on, that we’re buried in when we’re shut away from the sky altogether.
Looking over the lyric a couple days later, I think it’d be better on one level if I’d made something explicit about space probes or Trojans-as-asteroids in it, but on another level that would be way cornier and less sing-along-able. This, I can picture myself humming along to years from now.
LYRICS:
When you dig in the dirt / of this tired old Earth
Just look up and ask yourself why
The thing you can trust / is we’re bones and we’re dust
And there’s plenty more rocks in the skyThere’s plenty more rocks in the sky
There’s plenty more rocks in the sky
We’ll really teach steel how to fly
Cause there’s plenty more rocks in the skyThey’ll promise the moon / breaking open your tomb
They’ll say you get stars in your eyes
They’re carving your name / setting engines aflame
And there’s plenty more rocks in the skyThere’s plenty more rocks in the sky
There’s plenty more rocks in the sky
We’ll really teach steel how to fly
Cause there’s plenty more rocks in the skyAs we’re spinning in space/ every life leaves a trace
We can count them if we’re willing to try
From the apes to the Trojans to rocket explosions
There’s plenty more rocks in the skyThere’s plenty more rocks in the sky
There’s plenty more rocks in the sky
We’ll really teach steel how to fly
Cause there’s plenty more rocks in the sky