Songs for Saturday: In Memoriam

Content Warning: perhaps not for the extremely death-phobic. [skip]

So, today is Día de Muertos as well as Saturday, and I see that none of my memorial songs have been Songs for Saturday. I ought to fix that.

 

The first one, Keep the Dream Alive [ogg] [mp3], was written in 1986 shortly after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. There was a memorial concert at Bayfilk III; mine one of the few written for the occasion that are still being performed. I was aiming for hope, not grief; I think I hit it.

I had to add a verse in 2003 for Columbia.

 

After Dad was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 1997, I wrote The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of [ogg] [mp3]. Dad was a long-time science fiction fan; I don't whether that's connected with the fact that he and Isaac Asimov were both in the chemistry department at Columbia, but it's possible. "Stuff" is basically nostalgia for the future that never was. (There are detailed notes at the end.)

Sometime later, Mom suggested (rather strongly) that I write a song to be sung at his memorial service, and didn't think that "Stuff" was suitable. I had to admit that I didn't, either, so that one became Rainbow's Edge [ogg] [mp3]. Dad was one of the pioneers of infrared spectroscopy (in case you were wondering what the "color the eye can't see" was referring to), as well as using digital signal processing to analyze spectra.

 

My daughter Amethyst Rose was stillborn August 4^th, 1990, but it wasn't until 2002 that I was able to write a song For Amy [ogg] [mp3]. She has a cat now, but I still haven't written a song for Curio. Some day.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through )

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