There’s a reptilian alien pop-star who shows up around the edges of my Entangled Universe, and so, now that I can make music… I made her first album, Star-Shaker Sings!
“Fly High the Time” is a line my older kid came up with when he was four. He’s always been crazy good with words. Anyway, it seemed like a fun place to start Star-Shaker’s first album, and it was really fun making sure it had all kinds of sci-fi details.
Heart Like a Prism” is about having a different emotional palette than the people around you and responding in complicated ways to things that seem simple to other people.
A reptile alien is such a perfect avatar for exploring something like that.
If you’re working with a reptile alien character, you’ve got to play with the things that make reptiles different and interesting. Thus a song about Star-Shaker wishing she could go “Back to the Egg” — a place of peace, before everything got big and loud.
I always loved Cat Stevens’ song “Moonshadow,” so I knew I wanted to use that phrase in Star-Shaker’s first album. So, we have “Getting Out of Your Moon Shadow.” And of course, getting out of someone else’s shadow takes on an extra layer of weight for a cold-blooded reptile who needs the sun’s warmth.
My mom’s favorite poem is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. She read it aloud to me many times as a child. And you’ve got to love the phrase “the mermaids singing each to each,” so I thought, why not make it about robots? Why not make it “The Robots are Singing”?
Look, algae packs are cool, and so I thought Star-Shaker should have a song about them. And then “The Algae Pack Song (Light for Air)” turned out all awesome and catchy. So… take that, universe.
There’s this wonderful Jim Croce song — The Hard Way Every Time — and I thought, what if it’s not just learning the hard way, but actually learning the wrong lesson? So, we get “Learned the Wrong Lesson.”
I was thinking about the Tom Petty song “Free Fallin’,” and it just seemed like if you’ve got a far future, space opera reptile alien pop-star writing songs, she could do one about free fall where it’s both literal and a metaphor for her feelings, which led to “Scales in a Jar (Free Fallin’).”
As a reptilian alien, Star-Shaker absolutely needed a song about how fresh and new everything feels after every time she sheds her skin. Thus “Shed My Skin (Brand New Again).”
The final track on Star-Shaker’s first album, “Don’t Eclipse My Star,” is a triumphant declaration — she’s been through a lot, but she won’t be held back. She is a star, and she’s not going to be eclipsed.