“Stealing Promethean Fire” is the first song I made with Claude & Suno without a short story as a framework to base it on or a poem I’d written years ago. So it felt like a huge leap, because being able to make songs like this is so important to me.
“Klein Bottle Water Slide” is a song idea that came to me as I was falling asleep, and I knew I definitely needed to jot it down so I’d remember in the morning. It’s exactly as silly and bouncy fun as the title implies.
I had to make a song called “Brian’s Gone.” It’s my answer to “Brian’s Back,” but Claude helped me to make it into a space opera song about a broadcast from a faraway star. It’s really the emotional heart of the whole album, and it sounds exactly right.
“Waiting for the World” was my attempt to create a song like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.”
Obviously, obviously it falls so far, far, far short. So far. But hey, aim at the stratosphere and maybe you get a decent little bunny hop.
I’ve written dozens of books, sold stories to highly competitive magazines, and won awards for my fiction, but song lyrics just kind of… escape me. I try. I have tried.
I wanted so badly to write lyrics that would impress Brian Wilson and make him want to write songs with me.
When I was 15 I’d listen to the instrumental tracks on Pet Sounds and try to figure out how to write lyrics for them.
I would stare and stare at a piece of notebook paper where I’d scrawled “I’m watching the moon bounce all along the skyline.”
I never could figure out what came next, even though I just kept coming back to that line…
But now, with the help of Claude and Suno, I can hear the full song and finally know what the next line is, and it’s so good.
“Bright, Sharp, Fleeting” is a song about surfing the clouds on a gas giant, because if I’m doing space opera surf rock, then that was an absolute necessity of a song.
“Back in the Same Dream” is a quietly haunting song about returning over and over again to a dream space where you feel more at home than the waking world, building it up and making it your true home.
“Halfway Happy” is a song about two people compromising and meeting in the middle. Because it’s also space opera, that middle ground is very literally halfway between two different stars they were each chasing after.
“Both (Tentacles and Wings)” is a bouncy, fun manifesto of a song about rejecting the binary, refusing to be forced into only one box.
It works metaphorically, yes, but also, I’d love to have tentacles and wings—the deep that crawls, the sky that sings!
“(Don’t) Say Anything” is an idea I’ve had for a song since I was fifteen — blending the quiet sweetness of “(Don’t Talk) Put Your Head On My Shoulder” with the emotional rawness between Ione Skye and John Cusack in Say Anything.
It turned out perfect.
“Singularity’s Edge” references “Surf’s Up” and “Circle Sky.” Its lyrics are over the top poetic, but its meaning is simple and hits me hard — it’s about how something can’t be perfect until it’s over, and once it’s over, all you want is back inside.