There’s a long story behind this particular track 🙂
Listen as you read:
First, the track itself was something of an “accident”. I thought I’d try my hand at making a piece of music for some specific videos, but it went astray as it does and became very “me” with the guitars, and not so suited for the videos.
So it was rejected for that use, but I had already begun to have an odd feeling about the song. Enter “Bill and Ted: Face the Music“
As I was watching the movie, I got a very strange thought, not really anything that the movie was all about or trying to say, but that’s the way my mind works, going off at its own tangents and getting its own insights.
I had this sudden sense rather like the Total Perspective Vortex in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, where I saw the enormity of the universe. Right now, at this very moment, stars are exploding, black holes are swallowing up unimaginable amounts of matter, asteroids are drifting through the void where no living thing has ever seen their surface in billions of years (at all, in fact), rogue planets are hurtling through the desolation of space between the stars….
It’s all so vast, and against that backdrop, each of us is tiny. Heck, all of us taken together are still tiny, our planet is tiny, our solar system tiny.
How do we continue to go on, when confronted by this vastness, which cares nothing for us as we are so small against it? How do we live our lives, knowing that we last for less than the blink of an eye, everything we do, feel, say, think, nothing but such a small flicker in both duration and importance?
The answer –
We dance, we sing, we make music.
This is our act of defiance. Or at least it is my act of defiance. I make music, and through that I “rage against the dying of the light”. I defy the briefness and triviality of existing.
I realized that nagging thought was what the piece was all about. With that now set, I dove in to recording the other guitar solos, and found its name – “One Voice in the Infinite”.
I also had a picture in my mind of what I wanted the cover image for this piece to be – one person standing small against the scale of the universe, making music.
I dug up an old photo of me at a gig, one of my old photos of some Scottish mountains, and stock footage of stars and galaxies and put it together, and was very pleased with how it came out, it captured the feeling that I had (other than I really should have made the figure so small that it couldn’t be seen 😉 )
Despite it being heavy stuff, the track remains bright, cheerful and accessible – there’s no actual “rage” in it, just pure celebration of being alive, yelled out to the vastness. One voice, in the infinite.
All the best,
Tom (Cu Sithe)