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Today we are pleased to join forces with John Calvin for the release of his new post-grungle single “Gravity,” a track that takes on the weight of the world and the crushing inescapability of time. “All the heroes are ground to dust / Just to pave the street / As we waltz along endlessly / To a tune we call time,” he sings.
About the song, Calvin comments, “During the pandemic, my family would go on evening walks through the neighborhood and we took an interest in stargazing. On a clear night, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter could be seen with the naked eye. We also learned the names of the full moons, which was also partly inspired my single “Sturgeon Moon.” That led to me reading ‘big history’, which deals in a more geologic time frame, from the roughly 14 billion years the universe has existed to the last 2 million years of human life on earth. That kind of scale is both awe-inspiring and not a little terrifying. “Gravity” is really all about the awe-inspiring bit.
In a word, the song is geologic. Pat Coyle is heavy on the toms through the intro, Greg DeCarolis gives it a slight Zarathustra-vibe with the Hammond organ. And the song builds from there, geologic in those moments of quiet solitude punctured by crashes like a heavy bombardment. In the end, it’s meant to be a celebration of the world around us and a reminder that there’s plenty of mystery and intrigue in the natural world to last a lifetime.
In the second verse I sing, “Aimlessly / She drifts through aimlessly / Oh, the gift of eyes to see / On a cloudless night.” The reference to “drifting aimlessly” is actually a reference to celestial bodies. You might say that an orbit is actually an aim, but aim implies agency or intent. And that’s the beauty of nearly all of the natural world, that it moves on without a defined objective, it simply is. You can be awed or terrified by that indifference or you can savor the moments you are able to even partially recognize it and appreciate it for what it is.
At the start of the song, the narrator is calling out with something like an interstellar message and they’re calling from a moon garden. I didn’t know anything about moon gardens until I read The Planets by Dava Sobel and I was fascinated. A moon garden is planted primarily with flowering plants that sparkle in the moonlight. Often all white or nearly so, these plants are more active in the night and make for an ideal setting for stargazing. The flowers that are referenced in the song, blooming snowdrops and bleeding hearts, are moon garden flowers.”
