Earth 2
I wrote Earth 2 immediately after finishing the Three Body Problem series of books. It's hard to recommend those books without spoiling the whole thing. The books cover a lot of human history, past, present and possible future.
It might be enough to say that Book 1 is a story about a country, Book 2 is a story about a planet and Book 3 is a story about the universe.
The size of it really got me. The shifts in perspective make every book feel different, even if they're covering parts of the same story.
I lived in an apartment at the time. Well, when I heard the first one (it was an audiobook) I lived in a house 15 minutes away from Guadalajara. When Covid hit, I went walking in a field that could be seen out the window behind my house. I wrote a song about it that I haven't really done anything with. I heard the audiobook as I walked through the field and it was very exciting.
When I finished the third book I lived in an apartment. Inspiration hit me way less often than when I was young1 and I hadn't felt it in a while. I sat down to finish the book and, after finishing, I had this very clear image of a dot in space. In the grand scheme of things, that who we are. Making things into a dot can mean that you stop thinking there's other things inside of it. If you make a dot in a page, it's easy to think that's what it is. The dot is just a dot I made with the pen. If you zoomed-in, though, you would see that the ink in the dot creates microscopical branches that make the dot into a fuzzy, inky microbe. Dot no longer, it reaches for the edges of where it has been placed, becoming a dark sun.
If you zoom in on the earth, the ink of our steps would create an even livelier and possibly much scarier image. From far enough away, though, every action we make is insignificant. Atoms in the other side of the universe feel not the vibrations that my voice emits on an afternoon.2
The lyrics came easy and quick; I only had to order them. The bass part was the origin of it all. Then came the shouting. I felt like it would be important to add stuff happening all over the place. I like when stuff is happening all over the place.
I had the fortune to commission a verse from R.A.P. Ferreira, who has been one of my favorite artists since the late 2010's. The verse speaks for itself, and I can't believe I have one of them in one of my songs. I hope to commission many more in the future.