SONG: Inside the Moon

SONG: “Inside the Moon”. (OGG version here.)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: BBC, 15 July 2024, “Cave discovered on Moon could be home for humans“, as used in the post “There’s a cave on the moon we could live in.”

ABSTRACT: This is one of the very few songs finished well ahead of deadline, in part because I knew I’d be traveling and in close quarters over the 23rd. It started as a combination of two different melodic things: First, I was playing around with open-G tuning again, just finding different ways to use it, and second, I got earwormed by an old favorite song (“I’m Straight,” by The Modern Lovers) and realized it had the same three-chord progression as “Summertime Rolls,” by Jane’s Addiction, but sounded pretty different.

So this is a three-chord song. You never need more than three chords (“It’s just how you play them,” per The Ramones). I was sort of surprised at how laid back it came out with that silvery guitar noodling going on, but I really like the “lunar” quality of it. The choruses were meant to be a little amped up compared to the verses, so I started out putting a drone down there … because in addition to The Modern Lovers, I’ve been listening to a lot of hurdy-gurdy music over the last few weeks. The rest fell into place around that.

I’m a little surprised that lyrically I couldn’t work in the actual title of the post, since “There’s a cave on the moon we could live in” sounds like a pretty good line for a chorus or something, but it needed that dun-dun…dah meter for the Bb-to-G bit at the end of the line. And the point is less that there is a home in the Moon as much as it is we are making temporary digs there to help with the general mission of looking elsewhere because things are (we assume) getting kind of scarce and crowded here on Earth.

This is not a post-apocalypse song, but the narrator is definitely looking back at Earth when it’s visible in the sky and imagining what it would be like to see the home planet light up and then go dark, Martian Chronicles-style. He also is aware of what it means to build structures inside a landscape with mythic significance. Even the first space missions had the names of gods, after all. And the hollow hills are home to even older beings. Is this an astronaut folk-horror song? I don’t think so, but I can see why someone might think it could be. Space, as I always think of it, is a thing that never stops trying to kill you, freeze you, blind you, steal your breath. And yet there we go.

LYRICS:

There’s a hole in the sky
Where a silver light would shine
On fools, werewolves and lovers
Back in time

But things got hot and crowded
And the night got bright and loud and
We got thirsty for water and
Astronauts’ lives

CH1:
This desert cave is lonely
I’d like to see you soon
But I’ll be up here watching
Inside the Moon

I’ve got grey rubber boots
I’ve got a visor for the sun
I’ve got a thousand hours of podcasts
I don’t hear from anyone

It makes the tides run timely
And the space back home so wide
When I see that marble fill the night
I get something in my eyes

CH2:
This desert cave is lonely
I hope you’ll see me soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the Moon

This desert cave gets lonely
I hope you’ll see me soon
I’ll be up here waiting
Inside the Moon

I have dreamed of circles burning
As I watch the world keep turning
Like a caveman spinning stories
From stars at night

Tonight I’ll go to sleep here
After digging even deeper
Scraping stone and dust and mining ice
To make more room

CH3:
This desert cave is lonely
I’d like to see you soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the Moon

Our desert cave is lonely
But I’d like to see you soon
I’ll be up here watching
Inside the Moon

Pray to Mercury and Apollo
As the piper calls the tune
I have made all these hills hollow
Inside the Moon.
Inside the Moon, Inside the Moon
These hills are hollow inside the Moon