Every month, I’m going to introduce a different song from the album, probably in the order of the tracklisting.
The rationale is that I don’t see much need to release digital ‘singles’ (I don’t plan on releasing CDs or vinyl mainly due to the unnecessary plastic) but, at the same time, I’d like to give a bit of a spotlight to the songs and explain what they’re about.
So for March, it’s Looking Through a Telescope Backwards, which I came up with in late 2022 while playing acoustic guitar like I do with most of my songs. I was using a type of tuning where I replace the D string with a high E string and tune it to D – a bit like a ukulele. It’s a good way to come up with new ideas since all the normal chords sound a bit different.
I liked the way the chords jumped around between keys and the melody almost didn’t work at one point but just managed to make it back into the starting key. The music called for a unique lyric and I just happened to come across an article on tackling climate change through science.
It’s the sort of high-risk thing I could see governments and elites of the future seriously considering and the song imagines what it might be like for you or me to to walk outside one day and see the sky change colour, and also what life in other galaxies might think if they knew.
The arrangement has a theremin-influenced wiggling organ sound weaving through it, which was created by frantically adjusting the pitch changer on my bashed up old keyboard.
See how I did it in the accompanying video – entirely faked of course, and the keyboard isn’t even switched on.