SONG: “I Am Your Library”. (available as .ogg here)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on Science Daily, 25 Mar 2024, “New archive of ancient human brains challenges misconceptions of soft tissue preservation,” as used in the post ‘An archive of ancient human brains’.
ABSTRACT: I didn’t think I’d have a song in time. But then I sort of realized I could … I could just put the laptop on my chest, lie back, and record that way, late at night in the sleeping house. So I did.
This song, production- and arrangement-wise, owes more to Tom Petty than might be immediately obvious. I was listening to a video about him on YouTube a few weeks ago, and they noted that he believed in the precept “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” and wrote at least one song, maybe more, that actually put the chorus in front of the verses, the first thing you hear in the song. So that was sort of lurking in the back of my mind.
And then, when I got to writing a lyric down, the chorus had a lot of “I”s in it, which sort of made me think, OK, that’d make for a fun backing vocal, which made me think of that kind of eternal backing vocal in the choruses of “American Girl,” so I kinda thought “Huh, that’s a good trick.”
I really thought tonight I’d only do that backing vocal layered and layered and leave the main vocals for tomorrow and mope my way into another penitential cover, but no. I didn’t do that.
The guitar here is one tuned down to an open-G tuning, which is what I wrote the chord progression in. I’m actually not even sure what key the song is in, since it starts with a chord that… well, it’s shaped like a barred-C but shifted up a string, and with the E and A strings tuned down two steps… I don’t know, I could figure it out if I had to. The lowest note is an F, anyway, and the second chord is all open, so it must be a G.
There’s one guitar track and two bass tracks, and a little synth track at the final chorus/outro, and a SoundFont drum. And then something like four or five pairs of vocal tracks, some with echoes and reverbs, and some panned hard left and right.
As far as the subject of the song, there was a lot of interesting stuff about brains over the last five weeks, and I halfway thought this would be about the virus that made brains happen. But no, it’s about libraries and memory. (Have I been using the word “library” a lot in songs lately? It feels like maybe I have. I wonder why.)
I think there’s a subtext in the lyrics here that maybe if a brain is recoverable, it’s somehow reconstructable, which is not what anyone is saying in the actual research. They’re just into the fact that soft tissue (and I guess all the lovely DNA inside it) survives more often than you’d think and is probably worth looking out for. This is more of an ode or apostrophe to a long-preserved brain, lying inside the hollow of a prehistoric person’s cranium.
Hello, old neighbor. Nice to see you’re still around… at least a little bit.
LYRICS:
I am your library
I am an archive of health and disease
And I won’t fade till you read me
Over centuries.V1.
Muscle and blood are here and then gone
The thing that lasts is within the bone
The metal that’s buried beside us
Remembers what matters inside usCH
V2.
Preserved like a century egg
Molecules fused in the space in my head
I remember you dreaming the day I was dead
The grey is still sleeping, still keeping me.CH/SOLO
OUT:
Your library
Over centuries
Still believe
I’m your library