BREAKDOWN ANALYSIS by Planet Giles
TRACK #8
SPIRIT OF AQUARIUS
(from the INSIGHTS album released in 2022)
This was a tricky track for us. Because we couldn’t really figure out what to do with it in a production sense! The song stood up on its own with a piano and vocals. But once it became about the addition of anything more than that, the song itself did not yield up anything we could get a handle on. I guess you could say that there was a message in that. And yet we persevered. And I’m glad we did because two very interesting things happened as a consequence.
Pete wrote a phenomenal horn ensemble arrangement for the coda. It was mellow, understated and had a touch of the Thad Jones / Mel Lewis jazz orchestra about it whom he loved. It’s gentle latin jazz vibe became something that we found compelling and soothing to listen to in the studio. It reminded me of Neal Hefti’s writing, where everything he wrote seemed to be the perfect backing track or soundtrack to a certain mood or atmosphere.
In particular, I remember Hefti’s beautiful score for the Jack Lemmon / Virna Lisi black comedy movie, ‘How to Murder Your Wife’. It is hard to upstage a woman as stunningly beautiful as Lisi. But Hefti manages to do it very well indeed as we first hear one of his main themes when Lisi rises nervously from a friend’s huge cardboard birthday cake! Italian Lisi’s natural innocence, guilelessness and intelligence (indeed she left Hollywood very early on, as she couldn’t stand being typecast as the requisite ‘blonde bimbo’) has the perfect foil in Hefti’s gentle and seductive brass ensemble. He himself was a jazz trumpeter. And this is evident in all he pens.
I’ve always been pleased with my opening line to the colla voce intro, something I wrote a long time ago. I always loved studying English at school. I had a magnificent teacher who adored the subject and taught it with relish. I particularly loved poetry, as I now realise that poems are lyrics without music, and were the precursor to my love of writing song lyrics. The inspiration for the first line was from Wordsworth’s poem, The Daffodils:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud...”
My opening lines are:
“I wondered lonely as a child
What is life about?”
I was always amazed that the line expressed so perfectly what I felt, and was simultaneously so close to Wordsworth’s immortal line! Serendipitous indeed!
Our chorus:
“Step by step it’s changing by the Force of Grace
Earth will be like Heaven for the Human Race...”
is a recurring theme in our album, overtly and covertly. The idea that one day we will return to the Garden of Eden, before humans ‘fell from grace’. And we will! We are slowly but surely making our way back home. And as doomy or scaremongering or negative as things seem to be at times, nothing can keep Evolution from its mapped out job spec of returning humanity to its source collectively. We are all pawns in Evolution’s game, and we are all an important part of Evolution’s storyline.
As we move deeper into the Aquarian Age, all we need do is continue following the unfolding of our own personal stories:
“Everybody waiting patiently for Love
Brought in by the Spirit of Aquarius”
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