The Long Listen

(Or, the Long & The Short of It)

Radio edits: – a song between 2 min. 50 seconds, and 3 min. 20 seconds long. Well, that’s the ballpark – say, get it down to 3 minutes in total. There is a hardline discipline to cutting your favourite composition down to something that short, with an equally limited arrangement of verses and choruses, if you want to release it. But, in today’s world of listeners with TikTok-short attention spans, that’s how fast you have to get through the song. That’s how long you get to grab them. And if it’s nice, they’ll play it twice (to misquote the title of the hit Dance track, “Play it Twice“) or maybe more.

I gave up on the requirement for 3 minutes of playtime when I wrote this track about outer space nebulas. It’s called “Beautiful Shapes”, and seriously, I could not describe these beautiful nebulas in fewer words than what I have here. The track’s 6 minutes and 27 seconds long, and since it is so long, I asked my mix engineer, Luke Garfield, to combine the vocals of Dawn Lief and Ben Alexander, giving each one a turn to perform a verse about a nebula. Dawn and Ben had recorded their vocals in difference locations, and separately, at different times. But, since they are both professionals, each one, independently, exactly met the requirements of the vocal score. (It’s remarkable, really, when you think about it.)

The song depicts a few of the awesomely beautiful nebulas in our galaxy, and the sounds they make – yes they do make sounds. The nebulas are the NGC 1569 Nebula, the Butterfly Nebula, and the Crab Nebula. The sonifications recorded from these nebulas by NASA and SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida) are part of the composition – they sound mostly like electronic noises or a single chord. Since the nebulas move and pulsate, and implode and explode, the synchronizing of the lyrics with the beat varies.

Lyric video – Beautiful Shapes

Lyrics – Beautiful Shapes

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