SONG: “Something’s Knocking on the Door”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “China’s Bold Plan Unveiled: A Deep-Sea Space Station 6560 Feet Underwater Set to Revolutionize Marine Exploration by 2030,” Sustainability Times, 16 June 2025, as used in the post China’s undersea station.
ABSTRACT: Another song about Chinese science? OK then.
I had the music virtually complete for this one something like three weeks early. It started with trying to make a synthetic Rhodes piano sound like a piano player sort of “strumming” chords, lounge-style, not hitting all the notes at once. Warren Zevon does it on “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” but maybe so does any decent pianist – the individual notes of a chord are played just barely separately as the player fans fingers out and sort of massages the keys. Baludaling! Anyway, that’s really hard to do if you’re painting individual notes across a staff and not physically playing an instrument. It sounded sort of watery, though not exactly what I was going for, so I sort of built the chunk-chunk guitar over that, then added some bass and two drum tracks (gotta have a separate track for fills).
And then hmm. A long time looking at science stories and thinking I need to be better about finding them nowadays. (I miss New Scientist‘s free feed.) There was the undersea space station, though….
I tried a couple times to write a sort of “this is our new home, isn’t it strange” kind of lyric, and that didn’t thrill me and it didn’t match the music. Hmph. So then I was thinking, well, it’s really about, the music is about someone who wants something that isn’t there. And that was the thing. The guy misses the girl who is the scientist who is in the station under the ocean. He feels left behind.
There was some internal comparisons to the structure of Camper Van Beethoven’s “All Her Favorite Fruit” which tells the same sort of story and which also ends in a sort of fantasy, and to the general vibe of a song of mine, “Blood Sweat Horses,” which is sweeter, about a couple of archaeology students falling in love at the dig site.
I’m not sure why this song insisted on ending in an imagined disaster, but probably because when I first posted the article, it immediately made me think of Kristen Stewart in UNDERWATER, which is about a sea base where things go wrong. Maybe it’s also reminding me of past relationships, people moving away, and it feeling like the ocean was falling on me. There is also a Thomas Dolby quote, which suits the theme. (I had to work hard *not* to make a lot of “Major Tom” allusions, but the “tin can” is more than enough, right?)
I tried to resist the urge to fill the end of this with humpback whale sounds, but there’s a little bit of that in there, along with what I guess is one of my favorite sounds to use in any song, which is that sonar ping. I grabbed that off the drum loops from a CD-ROM of Acid (the sound is called “Noise Shot”, not to be confused with “Noise Shot Loop”) sometime in the 1990s. It still brings me joy … in part because it could be the sound of a meter showing the world collapsing … as the bone-white amphipods close in … with some colossal shadow in the distance behind them.
LYRICS:
V1
I finish work & I drive home
And ride the elevator up alone
And wonder what is in the air she’s breathingI look outside the sliding glass
As city lights blink on at last
And wonder what turns on the lights she’s seeingV2:
She was deep and now she’s deeper
Taking orders from the people
In uniform, she writes reportsHer dolphins diving through the data
Corals come through calculators
With creatures no one’s seen beforeSemi-CH:
The water’s dark / With living sparks
She mon-i-tors the meters
for the temperature
And the current
And salinity ….V3:
Late at night, when she’s asleep
I write an email I delete
And I swear I almost see herDo they know what they have taken?
When the morning sun is breaking
Up the home I hoped would be hersThey have new homes in the ocean
Two kilometers below
One might as well have been in orbitWhere amphipods, sea spiders walk
Outside imainary airlocks
Things unseen swimming toward itCH:
Where water’s dark / With living sparks
She monitors
The sound and the movements
and the chemistry
And the chemistryV4:
Is the regulator clear?
Who maintains your diving gear?
Can breathing nitrox be that healthy?I dream I’m under the same weight
Crushed by water and the state
Of things you thought you couldn’t tell meI know the mission must come first
The world is worth more than a person
In the place where life beganWe are reborn in the flood
Nothing more than talking mud
In nothing more than a tin canCH:
Where the water’s dark /
Where all the freezing sparks
Squeezing steel like it was …
paper overhead
Over the thermal vents
In the ocean bed
This is inside my head
Inside my head…V5:
(Something’s knocking on the door) And the sirens sound, lights spin around, who’s speaking?
(Something’s knocking on the door) Who saw the sensor say it’s leaking?
(Something’s knocking on the door) And the sirens sound, lights spin around, what’s hissing?
(Something’s knocking on the door) One of her submarines is missing
(Something’s knocking on the door) And the sirens sound, lights spin around, how could she forget me?
(Something’s knocking on the door) Has she really left me?
(Something’s knocking on the door) And the sirens sound, lights spin around, her new home is important
(Something’s knocking on the door) But I want to see her more
Something’s knocking on the door.