SONG: “Titanium Heart”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Man survives with titanium heart for 100 days — a world first,” Nature, 13 March 2025, as used in the post 100 days with a titanium heart.
ABSTRACT: I’m not sure why this took as long as it did, other than that I had a Very Full March. The weekend I would normally have been completing this song, I was (again) in a different city to bless a different wedding for a different old friend, but on returning home, I kind of just… had more things to do than time to do them in.
The secret key to this song, as with several other songs of mine, is the Man or Astro-Man song “Evert 1 Pipkin,” or really my cover of that song. It’s an apostrophe to a piece of equipment, it has about five vocal tracks of questionable quality, and a solo with lots of beeps and the rhythms of electrical equipment. If I’d had fewer things to do these past two months, I’d have recorded at least two of the vocal tracks into an old handheld cassette (or at least used the recorder’s microphone); as it is, I just put different filters and amp-modelers on tracks in a virtual way. The first guitar track is the usual nylon-string acoustic. All the others are with my old Squire Telecaster, which for whatever reason I just haven’t taken out of its case for years. (Lately, I’ve been using a Squire Strat that my stepdaughter found somewhere, which is hanging on a hook in my recording room, but this time it wouldn’t make any noise when I plugged the cable in. Something probably needs resoldering.)
There is a second secret key, which is more deeply encoded in the chord progression, and that is the Devo song “Blockhead,” which sort of stubbornly refuses to go where your mind expects it to go, working off tri-tones, which is to say, slides up or down one fret on the guitar neck instead of two or three frets like most progressions do. This may be a feature of a lot of new wave 80s music, but it seems to be at its purest distillation in “Blockhead,” or at least the chorus of “Blockhead.”
It is not that I am duplicating these secret keys; I am merely using them to open similar doors. Or not even that. These are ciphers to be decoded, which is to say they are languages with which one can learn to communicate.
The science behind the song is pretty fascinating, not least because I’ve got a heart thing myself. Nothing gives one perspective as much as becoming aware of your heartbeat, as you do sometimes, and then feeling it stop beating just for a second. When I looked into the technology behind the titanium heart (which, let’s just say it, is a pretty ROCK name for an object to begin with), one of the fascinating things to me is that it doesn’t beat at all; it has a spinning magnetic rotor that works like a water pump in a fountain, pushing the fluid through without ceasing. So it’s a machine without a rhythm. No mechanical tick-tock of a clockwork heart. No chugging diesel heart. It just goes.
I suppose I should say that the lyrics took more work than I expected. I had to remove some detail to make the minimalism work; for instance, the first line should really be “superior vena cava” but that sounded non-musical.
I like the way the (first) secret key worked this time, again, though. It is a good skeleton for taking things away to get at the inner essence of a song.
Next up, some sort of penitential cover for March.
LYRICS:
C E(m) Bb F#-G / G G A A F F C C, G G A A E E E E
V1
Vena cava
Supply this flow
Fill up these chambers
Make fluid goCH
Keep steady time
Volumetric lines
A single moving partMagnetic rotor spins
Biventricular in
This titanium heartV2
Pulmonary artery
Pass on O2
5 liters per minute
Rushes throughCH
SOLOV3
Will I have feelings
Without this pounding?
Will nerves tell muscles
To move through surroundings?CH