Category: music

The Taller Mountains

When I was a boy, I often had the sneaking suspicion that the mountains were actually taller than they usually appeared. This only occurred when the storm clouds came down and obscured the mountaintops. At those times, the usual, everyday peaks vanished behind the grey. I would look at them and think, “Perhaps the real heights of the mountains are now revealed within the clouds, even though I can’t see them. Maybe they reach higher and higher, up into the stratosphere and into some strange realm.”

I never climbed the mountains in a storm (or any other time, for that matter, as they’re private property), but that would’ve been the time to climb them. Doubtlessly, the path would’ve gone higher than the regular humdrum mountaintop.

YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM…

Now that I’m an aged adult, one would assume I’d put such childish ways behind me. But, looking out my office window today at the rain clouds lowering down over the mountain range, the same thought enters my mind. I suppose I’m just a very aged boy.

There’s a similar idea in Lewis’ The Last Battle, toward the end of the book. The children and their various companions have finally entered the real Narnia. The heart of it is further on and higher up. The real truth behind mountains (and stairways, ladders, steps and apple trees) is further on and higher up. You can certainly climb a ladder down here on Earth, whether it is a corporate ladder at the XZY Widget Company or the ladder to fix the chimney, but the ladder that is even more real than your ladder goes on quite a bit higher. Pro tip: exercise your lungs so you can breathe easily at higher altitudes.

It’s an interesting thought to muddle on, and I suppose I’ll have to write about it in a book or perhaps just a song (almost have a whole new album done with the band I belong to–Inflatable Hippies–watch this space for announcement). In the meantime, I’ll leave you with wishes for a peaceful and merry Christmas, regardless of the doom and grumpy gloom seeping out of the White House like curdled milk spilling from a over-stuffed garbage bag (will they never learn?). Please enjoy a great deal of good food, good conversation, good music and good cheer. And may Heaven keep the beast from slouching to Bethlehem to be reborn. At least for a while yet.

Here’s a photo of our cat enjoying Christmas in the best way cats can.

Wake Up Dead by Inflatable Hippies

One of the songs from the new Inflatable Hippies album “Love in the Time of Lunacy.” I was invited to join the IH several years ago. Quite an honor, I must say. I don’t fully agree with their 20-year plan of subjugating the galaxy with their weird dadaist-music-as-life propaganda approach to devising a grand unified theory, but I’m along for the rest of the ride. I can’t argue with their foundational philosophy that all matter equals music. I doubt even James Maxwell would disagree; heck, he would’ve probably asked to join the band. Matter can be articulated by mathematics, which means that matter can be transposed into music. When we look at matter–the slag from an asteroid strike zone in Siberia, for example–we’re merely experiencing it in a non-musical key. But, any non-musical key can be transposed into any musical key of choice. I would guess that slag might end up as a minor key, though that might just be my narrow human perspective talking.

Anyway, here’s Wake Up Dead.

Project Update

The new Christmas album is done, of course.

12th draft just finished of the super secret script project. Not my idea, but my execution. Based on an idea thought up by an old friend. Fairly mind-blowing.

2/3 of a new epic fantasy done. 160,000 words and counting. It’s turning into a doorstop.

First song finished and recorded for next Inflatable Hippies album (just think of all those hippies floating through the sky–what a pastorally atmospheric sight, particularly during a beautiful sunset). Not a Christmas album at all. This one is more of a protest album. There’s plenty of things to protest on this, the third day of the new year. And the list will grow.

Every dream has got an end,

wake up in your bed.

But the light’s gone gray,

is this day

or are we dreaming instead?

Every story’s got an end

you know it in your head.

But the pages turn,

is there time to learn

before we wake up dead?

I’m kind of going in a Linkin Park meets Green Day, but in a more sensible fashion.

Christmas in the Multiverse

The complete album, minus the instrumental Glad Tidings on Proxima Centauri b. Feel free to share these mp3s with your friends and family. I’m not interested in making money off of these songs, so please send them to everyone on the planet. You can either listen to the tracks online, or you can right-click/control-click on them to download. Merry Christmas from across the galaxy!

 

Angels We Have Heard On High

Angels We Have Heard on High 2

Silent Night

Away in a Manger – We Three Kings

Little Drummer Boy

Good King Wenceslas

First Noel

Joy to the World

Christmas in the Multiverse

One of the odder theories in physics is the existence of the multiverse, as opposed to the singular universe. An indeterminate number of universes that co-exist, somehow sharing the same space (within a larger what?) but not impinging on each other. Paul Davies argues against the multiverse, asking sensible question as to how we could empirically test the existence of other universes if we can’t journey to them, observe them, test them in a lab, etc. Sensible, yes, but dull and not at all interesting from a story perspective. His objection assumes that science is the ultimate authority and measuring stick for everything else.

Which is a well-worn trap that we should perpetually examine with wary eyes.

Objections of various physicists and that bow-tied quack Bill Nye aside, some time ago I decided that, if a multiverse exists, then it stands to reason that all the music we know in this universe also exists in other universes, but in different forms. Sort of equivalent to endlessly rolling an enormous shipping container full of millions of dice. If you endless roll the dice, you’ll eventually have rolled every single possible combination.

Every single possible combination.

That means Silent Night, Away in a Manger, and Good King Wenceslas exist in many different forms throughout the multiverse. Some of those forms have the exact same lyrics but completely different music. Courtesy of a rather elegant trans-dimensional spaceship I own called the HMSS Imagination, I recently traveled to several different spots of the multiverse on an ethnomusicological expedition.

And have returned with the carols that make up the new album Christmas in the Multiverse from my band the Inflatable Hippies. It’ll be available on Apple, Spotify and all the rest fairly soon (yes, not in time for Christmas, but certainly in time for other Christmases in other parts of the multiverse, as time runs differently in some of those places). The full carol list on the album is: Silent Night, Joy to the World, Angels We Have Heard on High, Angels We Have Heard on High 2 (found in a different spot in the multiverse from where I found the first Angels), Little Drummer Boy, Away in a Manger-We Three Kings combo (that was an interesting planet; they combo everything, so Reese’s peanut butter cups are very popular there), Good King Wenceslas, First Noel and Glad Tidings on Proxima Centauri b. In the meantime, here are three of the carols: Angels We Have Heard on High, Joy to the World, and the First Noel.

 

Apparently, this post scores a zero on the Flesch Readability Scale due to containing too many difficult words and complex sentences. All I can bother saying is, grow up, Flesch.