Music lets you be in another place at the same time as living your life. Maybe that place is just hanging out with Taylor Swift. Or in the case of this album, it lets you take a guided tour through the solar system, led by a retro singing spaceman.
A song about the sun needs to be bright and shiny, bursting with light, and even so, I was almost afraid I overshot the mark with “Center of It All.”
But no, it’s good — I like songs that are relentlessly cheerful.
I was worried the lyrics for “Mercury Fly-By” might be too silly at first, but the more I’ve listened to this album, the more the ridiculousness of this song almost seems like the highlight of the whole thing. Silly is good.
I remember doing a report on Venus in fourth grade and having to present it to the class.
I think “Venus in the Evening” is approximately as educational as my report was and waaaaay catchier.
To get the right sound for my singing spaceman, I ask Suno to blend weird 80s synth pop and 60s California surf rock. The surf rock is the base, but the synth pop brightens up the production.
Some tracks skew more 60s, but “The Blue One” skews more 80s.
I almost skipped the moon on this tour of the solar system… but then I had to have a song about Europa, and it just seemed wrong to have a song about one of Jupiter’s moons and not our own. So, I went back and added “Moonlight on My Mind.”
“Red Planet Ride” may be the catchiest song on this do-wop tour of the solar system.
“Phobos on the left and Deimos on the right” gets stuck in my head so much, and I do not mind at all.
“Watch Out for the Rocks” is the most outright novelty song on this album.
I love how it both leans all the way in on the sci-fi cliche of asteroid fields being dense enough to look impressive on TV screens & also tries to educate about how that’s wrong.
There are a couple of tweaks I use on my main prompt for Cobalt Starstrong songs, depending on what vibe I’m going for with a specific song. The Jupiter song — “King of Everything” — is a perfect example of “angelic crystalline pure.”
If you’re doing a tour of the solar system, you’ve got to have a stop at Europa, and of course, “Under the Ice” references Arthur C. Clarke because his vivid description of the kelp alien in 2061 is exactly why I’m still thinking about Europa thirty years later.
Saturn’s rings are such a natural topic for a surf rock song to be centered on that’s it’s almost hard to believe I haven’t heard one before “Ringing Around Saturn”… but then, I guess that’s why I’m doing this project.
I like thinking about space, planets, and stars, and I like listening to smooth, layered harmonies with that bright California sound. Songs like “Sideways World” let me do both.
I love how Claude managed to find emotional cores for songs simply starting from the need to have a song for each planet and also sprinkle in little facts here and there to make the songs both fun and educational like “The Loneliest Color.” I really love working with Claude.
On Cobalt Starstrong’s tour of the solar system, Pluto definitely counts as a planet.
At first, this album ended at Pluto… but it just felt like it needed one of those playful vocal tags full acrobatic harmonies to really cap it off. So, I added “Beyond the Edge.”