SONG: “Jet Lagged”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “Depression linked to ‘internal jet lag’, study finds,” University of Sydney, 16 July 2025, as used in the post Depression is a form of jet lag.
ABSTRACT: The timing on this was odd. I feel like it came together much faster than usual, but I also feel like I could use another few months to take things away. I didn’t realize how late it was in the month until the 21st, so most of this came together in two days’ time — all but the lyrics.
I had been experimenting with hypnotic ambient loops – the kind of music that you find in guided meditations and ASMR videos, where it’s not based on drones per se but small, repeated figures. A lot of it is surprisingly … well, surprising, I suppose. Has little plaintive blue notes or shifts into minor keys like pop songs should. When I realized I needed to make an actual pop song, stat, I just saved a copy of what I’d been working on, deleted all the actual loops and melodic bits but kept the voices – hand drums, a string section (psaltery, nyckelharpa, and cello, if you’re curious), and a Rhodes-piano bass with some echo and sustain on it. Then I built that into a song, played a guitar over it, took apart all the under parts again, and then… well, it sounded pretty good. (There was another track, but I’ll get to that in a second.)
I knew words would be about the jet-lag study, but started out with some high-falutin’ nonsense about cycles and synchronizations, and no no no, just stick with “jet lagged,” why don’t you?
I recorded it without the string section but brought it back because of the occasional way the cello would hit something plaintive against the nyckelharpa loop (which is meant to give texture to the looping psaltery). It actually sounded like a fine song without the strings, so I will be wondering about that choice for weeks now.
It is of course a feeling that I know very well, to be slightly puffy and dislocated because the external world’s time seems all wrong, and no amount of coffee nor melatonin seems to help. I have never been diagnosed with chronic depression, but I know what this feels like. The sluggish anhedonia, bloodshot weight of breathing, why bother eat when there is no such thing as mealtime.
That is where the verses came from.
Oddly, maybe, one of the hurdles I had to overcome was that I had earwormed myself (embarrassingly) with one of my own songs, “Growing Batteries,” which has a really simple, satisfying twee-pop structure and I dunno, OK lyrics I suppose. As far as being about the science it was supposed to be about, it works. What really sticks in my head with that, I think, is the way the cello-bass line works with the dinging wine-glass celesta-sounding chimes. So with this song, “Jet Lagged,” I switched a sort of muddy and atonal gender sample (that’s Southeast Asian melodic percussion) over to that wine-glass SoundFont. It worked really well here, too. Maybe in 11 years, I’ll earworm myself with this one and start that cycle all over again.
It feels like this one was more inspired by the Velvet Underground than Heavenly, at least in the chorus. And the drumbeat (I did add a kit with hi-hat and snare over the hand drums) actually came from listening to old B-52s songs. That “dun-DUN” on the toms at the end of a couplet. Keeps things moving. Even when the song is about not, not wanting to, feeling like you already have moved too much, too fast, and it all needs to stop for a minute.
LYRICS:
There’s a clock
inside my bloodstream
And it’s running down (& I am running down too)There’s a lack
of regulation
In the chemistry (inside of me too)Jet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged = There’s too much to unpackJet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged = Can’t face these factsThere’s a clock
that I cannot feel
I know that it’s real (Been told that it’s real)I get chills
And I sweat alone in
Hot coffee and melatoninJet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged =There’s too much to unpackJet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged =No factsI lose track
of when the sun shines
And the lights that I see (They seem angry)There is a light
that never goes out
But it’s sure looking grey (All this stuff in the way)BR:
_ Out of sync –
_Who can think –
_Tick-tock goes the temperature
_Tick tock goes the judgment
And the logic
And the attitudeJet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged = Too much to unpackJet lagged = My thoughts turn black
Jet lagged = How do I face these factsJet lagged = Though I am locked in place
Jet lagged = Half asleep – and half in spaceJet lagged = Though I did not move
Jet lagged = Nothing to doNothing to do