This week the weirdness comes less from the music than from the combination of music and situation. Me and TheWife™ were in the middle of a crowded plane flight, rushing toward the other coast to deal with a family emergency. I’m passing the time (read: trying the ignore the cramped and somewhat hot conditions in “economy” class) by staring out the window and listening to music.
I don’t really know where we were. The flight was from Atlanta to San Diego. Somewhere out west, after the clouds vanished, I became mesmerized with the view of the mountains, wilderness, and the seemingly random placements of things like grids of center pivot irrigation (Yes, I had to look that up). In the middle of this comes a pulsing cello ostinato, followed by some horns and then a violin, all playing in unison. Above this dirge an operatic voice appears, singing of “…drill to the bottom…” and “…fires at the center.” Then there’s something about a dragon and I’m struck by how add this feels — the flying above what looks like a lunar landscape, the claustrophobic music, the cramped airplane seating, the harsh realities of life.
It turns out that the album this song comes from (recommended to me by Spotify because I happen to like Captain Beefheart) was put out by composer/bass clarinetist Aaron Novik. The lyrical base for Floating World Vol. 1 comes from three outsider poets Novik met while working part time at Adobe Books in San Francisco. “Earth as Dragon Egg” was written by Swan, a homeless man who used to be a news reporter, filmmaker, and family man. He sort of lost his mind and with it, that entire life.
Learning these things after the fact somehow made that cross-country flight even more surreal. But hey, sometimes life is like that.
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