It’s out now! The complete space opera surf rock album — Cobalt Starstrong the Singing Spaceman!
I dreamed about this album for nearly twenty years, trying to figure out how to make it, before Claude/Suno finally made it possible.
It was so worth the wait.
I’ve known for like eighteen years that the first track of Cobalt Starstrong’s album would be about the gravity going out on his spaceship, and it’d have a sort of Beatles’ “I’m Down” vibe to it.
And here it finally exists! “Gravity’s Out and I’m Down”!
“If everybody had an ocean” is one of the all-time great openings for a song, so I wanted to give Cobalt Starstrong a song with that kind of energy… but you know, on a star-spanning scale. Thus is born the song “Every Planet with an Ocean”… has a beach.
“Friends with a Hologram” is such a fun, silly song.
Claude really likes putting dialogue into songs, and mostly I tone that down… especially because Suno gets very talky when there’s a lot of dialogue… but it was just so funny in this one!
I love The Beach Boys’ music with so much of my heart, and “California Girls” is so iconic… so I needed Cobalt Starstrong to have a song of that type, even though I also wanted to dodge, like, the objectification…
So, I made it about reptile aliens. Thus exists “Cold-Blooded Girls.”
I wanted something quiet and pretty for Cobalt Starstrong, kind of in the vein of The Beach Boys’ “Hushabye,” and I figured it’d be nice to have it be about the gentle sound of the space dust brushing against his ship’s hull. And so we have “Hush on the Hull.”
Cobalt Starstrong needed a racing song. You know, “Little Honda,” “Lil’ Nash Rambler,” “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.”
You gotta have a racing song. And deep space is such a great location for it. Therefore, “Deep Space Race.”
I was rewatching Star Trek TNG’s “Disaster,” and the kids referred to “The Laughing Vulcan and His Dog.”
And I thought: that song should exist.
But if Cobalt Starstrong is singing it, swap out the Vulcan for a robot, giving you “The Laughing Robot and His Dog.”
Cobalt Starstrong needed a classic ballad-style love song to his car, or in his case, spaceship. I was thinking of something like The Beach Boys’ “Ballad of Ol’ Betsy.” You know, she’s old and beat up, but that just makes him love her more. And so we have, “She’s Not Much (But She’s Mine).”
I love how sweet the vocal turned out for “Singin’ in the Vacuum.” It’s the sweetest vocal on the album, and I love how earnest the song is about its concept — just being alone on a spacewalk, singing to yourself, reveling in the solitude.
You gotta close out the album on a strong note, and “One of These Days” just sings. Seriously, I live to hear harmonies like this, and now, I can hear them singing about my far future space opera universe.