Racing Gravity

 

This is Racing Gravity. I think it’s lots of fun. It’s a space pirate love song. Cos that’s a genre, right?

Like lots of my songs, it takes inspiration from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In that comedy scifi book there’s a fictional band called Disaster Area and all their songs tell the same story: “boy-being meets girl-being beneath silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.” I’ve got loads of songs that are basically love songs set against some sort of scifi or dystopian background. Satellites is about love despite the evil government drones, Run is about love at the end of the world. Whenever I’m not sure what to write, that’s one of my default lyrical settings.

Racing Gravity itself started as part of February Album Writing Month, an annual songwriting challenge. In that you have to write 14 songs in a month. And I only had the weekends so really it was 14 songs in 10 days. In practice that meant I had to write and demo each song in about an hour.

Racing Gravity started with the thought ‘I haven’t done anything in triplet time, so let’s do that’ and then I found myself messing around with the opening guitar pattern. The basic idea I thought was the same as ‘No Surface All Feeling’ a relatively obscure Manic Street Preachers, but as I write this I’m listening to that song for the first time in about a decade and actually my song is less of a rip off than I thought it might be! The Manics song is much slower and not in 3 time.

Racing Gravity is also the first studio recording of the Tom Slatter Band. Gareth on guitar, Michael on drums, Keith on bass. We’ve played a couple of gigs and released some little rough bootleg recordings. Gareth and Michael have also recorded for me on a few other projects. But this is the first of what will hopefully be many recordings together.

Here it is on bandcamp, where you can download for free it if you want to:

If you enjoyed this, why not read about more songs? For example you can find out more about my dystopian scifi album Happy People by clicking here.