Date: August 22, 2011
Title: Songs of Distant Earth
Podcaster: Darren Landrum
Link: http://eternalprototyper.com/
Description: This is a very science-light episode of 365 Days of Astronomy. Instead, I’m talking about my love of writing songs about space travel and manned orbital flight. I’m currently working on my first album, so I pick a few snippets of my work out, and then talk about the stories behind them. Stories of the loneliness on a generation ship, the fear of an astronaut about to fly into orbit for the first time, and a story about how I almost scrapped the whole album project and why I ultimately kept going.
Bio: Darren Landrum is a 35-year-old returning student, currently studying electrical engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He gained a love of music from his family, and he gained his love for physics from his first physics professor, H. C. Snyder, at the local community college. When he’s not making music, he’s making instruments, and then he’s making videos about making music and making instruments. He’s currently working on his first album, which will be available for free download. Eventually.
Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Craig Clark.
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Darren Landrum. I’m not an astronomer. Indeed, I really don’t have any science credentials. I’m a 35-year-old returning to school to get an EE degree, minoring in physics. But the other thing I like to do is make music. I have a small studio and very limited resources, so I take advantage of a lot of found sound and instruments I make myself, but that’s not the point of this podcast.
As you just heard, I tend toward making this kinda spacey prog rock stuff. That even includes the lyrics. Now, the piece I opened with doesn’t have any lyrics written for it yet, but I’m sure it’ll be about travelling to a new world or something awesome like that. In fact, I actually have written lyrics to a song about just that topic. It’s sung from the point of view of a man on a generation ship that’s mid-journey, lamenting about how lonely and empty it is, but still finding solace in someone he loves. Unfortunately, I don’t have vocals recorded for that one yet, so we’ll move on.
This song is about someone missing his mother. She left on a long journey into space, and he’s singing about being able to see the slowly-moving star that is the ship she’s on. Again, I still don’t have good vocal takes for this song, so you got to hear the solo, which, by the way, was played on a two-dollar penny whistle retrofitted with a rubber balloon reed.
The next snippet I want to play is of a more complete song. For this song, I tried to imagine the trepidation a first-time astronaut must feel when he or she boarding for his or her first flight.
So why do I write about these things? Well, I know I didn’t just want to write love songs, even though technically I still have. I think, more than anything, it’s about having a deep-seated love for science, for science fiction, and fantasy. It’s what I grew up with, and the fact that I never got sick of it is telling.
Now one thing I do feel compelled to point out is that I am well aware I’m not that great of a singer. In fact, there’s a story about this I think you all might find interesting.
Remember the song about the astronaut? What you’ve heard there is the culmination of over one-hundred takes, and it still needs some work. There had come a point where I was ready to give up, because it appeared I was unable to sing at all, something I hadn’t thought about before then. To top it all off, one person who had heard early takes went so far as to tell me I need to stop trying and find a singer, because he found it that bad. On the cusp of scrapping the entire project, I wrote to a man on the Internet about it, asking him if I should give up now, or continue to, as I put it, “suffer for my art” and try for those good takes no matter what. And he wrote me back! It was a brief message saying, don’t give up, and keep on suffering.
That man’s name is George Hrab.
This final song, you’ll get to hear in its entirety. Once upon a time, on a Science Channel show whose name I can’t recall, Doctor Michio Kaku was talking about early supermassive stars and how they made the heavy elements that we’re now made of. Then he commented on the fact that poets and songwriters write about our mother the Sun, but never write about our true mothers, the early supermassive stars. I took that as a challenge. Although, in the end, I made the lyrics abstract enough that they could be about anything, rest assured, that Doctor Kaku was really my inspiration.
I’m Darren Landrum, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy it.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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