SONG: “Einstein’s Idea (a penitential Johnny Flynn cover)” . (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This is a penitential cover of a song by actor/singer/songwriter Johnny Flynn, who played Albert Einstein in National Geographic’s Genius for Ron Howard, and then wrote this song as a lullaby for his baby son.
ABSTRACT:
Vocals: If I had any sense at all, I’d have gotten a capo years ago.
Guitars: There are four tracks: a rhythm nylon-string (over which I’m singing – a scratch track), a pitch-shifted bass nylon string (with some fuzz on the choruses), and two tracks of noisy electric guitar (one split into a left and right with delay-with-sustain set to different periods).
Recording: I did not think the world needed another folksy version of this song – the original is more than enough – but once I cracked it (ok, not a waltz but 3/4 power pop?) then getting a hi-hat down with a simple boom-chick drum track was pretty easy. The rest of it was all down to finding time to actually make noise into a microphone.
It remains a marvel to me that the longer I’ve spent practicing the engineering part of making a song how much better I am at controlling a sound and how much harder it is to hear the sound actually as it is in the moment. Months later, I’ll listen back and hear an overwhelming cymbal or an near inaudible snare hit. Engineers call it “ear fatigue,” I think. Because I’m alone, I have to figure it out myself, and because I have these arbitrary deadlines, I don’t have the opportunity to let the ears rest to really hear things as they are, rather than what they sound like after listening to the same tone over and over for 20, 30, 90 minutes. For days.
I won’t be sure if the electric guitar noisiness is too pushy, too noisy, for weeks or months. I knew once Einstein entered the picture, I wanted some kind of crunch, something electric and dynamic because here we have science playing a different sort of music than mythology while adding to the same tune.
The song: I am a little hazy about when I first heard Johnny Flynn. I’m fairly sure it was a duet he was singing with Laura Marling, who I was looking up a lot of songs by on YouTube for a week or a month or however long a few years back. Was it as long as a decade ago? I know I promptly forgot about him – I think I assumed he was just some friend of hers hanging around the back yard with a guitar – until the BBC released THE DARK IS RISING as a radio play/podcast last winter solstice. I fell utterly in love with the soundtrack – the main song was perfect for the story – and started looking up who did it, and what else he’d done, and how I hadn’t heard of him until now. But I had. That blond fellow in that woman’s back yard all those years ago, what was her name? Laura something. Oh, right. That was lovely song, too. Gosh, what else has he done?
And then I found this little gem of a song about constellations and relativity, but also about explaining these things to children, which means at the same time about the stories we tell ourselves to understand these things. The mathematical metaphor for the very large objects and the very vast spaces which we see all at once in patterns across the sky. I don’t think I really did it justice, but I had a bit of fun finding another potential thing inside it, from a different point of view.
Ongoing: I still have another cover owed, because I blew two deadlines, as well as an original song which at this point is likely to be about wolves one way or another, if not about robots that move like animals. We’ll see.
LYRICS:
Come let’s be gentle, be soft in my arms
There’s moonstorms been brewing and grain in the barns
Your mother is sleeping, I’ll play my guitar
The twilight is keeping us close to the stars
Here’s where the stories live, here with the peace
Oh the kindly ol’ night wrapped warm in her fleece
Oh dream up a hot day, oh dream and be full
Of Orion, his bow, the plough and the bull
Oh, my darling (x8)
Go trust in their strength for these are your friends
And pledge in them now for their love knows no end
The bull looks a meanie but he’s on your side
And he pulls the plough which comes and divides
Put space in the heavens, Einstein’s idea
And he’s your friend too, so nothing to fear
Orion’ll help there, his darts find the dark
And all you need do is watch for his mark
Oh, my darling (x8)
The suns and the moons and the galaxies far
Were cast from his bow before they were stars
Oh and the gap in-between them is nothing to us
Our eyes cut the distance as loving eyes must
From me unto you, son, from dust unto dust
Oh, my darling (x8)