Tags
album, album art, aliens, amber, as if to nothing, craig armstrong, inhaler, music, new york city, story, title, track listing
Sometimes I like to do this thing where I make up stories for albums that have nothing to do with the albums themselves. These stories are usually just based on the song titles, and have little or nothing to do with the lyrics or music. I’ll give an example with Craig Armstrong’s As If to Nothing. The track listing for the album is as follows:
- Ruthless Gravity
- Wake Up in New York
- Miracle
- Amber
- Finding Beauty
- Waltz
- Inhaler
- Hymn 2
- Snow
- Starless II
- Stay (Faraway, So Close!)
- Niente
- Sea Song
- Let It Be Love
- Choral Ending
I’ll reference the tracks with their numbers, followed by what part of the story they resemble for me. So, here goes nothing:
1: You’re falling through the sky, maybe from space, and everything is a great blur. You’re accelerating towards the ground at an unbelievable pace — it feels like the world around you is being torn apart — and you’re about to crash. Boom! You land in the concrete and make a big hole in the street. You remain there, not being able to move a limb, and then you fall asleep because you’re, oh, so tired. 2: You wake up and find yourself in the streets of what you recognize as New York City. You climb out of the hole your body created in the concrete, dust your shoulders, and get moving. 3: It suddenly hits you: where are all the people? You’re in one of the busiest cities in the world, but there’s nobody to be seen. And it’s not like the city’s dead or deserted, no. It’s just… very quiet. 4: You’ve done some exploring now outside, but found no one. You decide to start exploring inside, and so you enter the butcher’s shop that is closest to you, and there they are, people. But what is that? They’ve all been frozen in amber. You don’t understand how or why or when that happened. 5: So there it is, the city of New York. Everything’s so still, but not in a dead way, no. It’s as if the people are learning to be more like trees. They’ve all slowed down and can appreciate everything around them. 6: You move around the city for a while and up in a dance hall, in what appears to be a dance party. Looking at the band’s sheet music, you see that they were playing a tango waltz. All of the frozen couples look so happy. They’re sort of dancing forever now. 7: It’s been a few hours now since you’ve started exploring, and the night is approaching, so you check your pockets for anything that you might use in your exploration. You find an inhaler. But, just before you could lift it up to your mouth, it falls and sprays on one of the human couples frozen in amber instead. You pick the inhaler up from the floor, and find, to your great surprise, that the couple whom were sprayed upon were now free from the amber. 9: You can’t believe what just happened, and so you start talking to them to see what the story was. It is now snowing outside, so you decide to take a walk with them as they tell you the story. The story is that an alien spaceship flew over the city in broad daylight a few days ago, and they froze all breathing creatures in amber. 8: You’re now on the rooftop of a skyscraper, watching the sky and singing together. The gentle snow has stopped now, and you’re trying to make sense of all of this. 10: You’re still watching the sky, when you suddenly realize that it is starless. What’s up with that? The lights of the whole city are off, so you should be able to make out at least a few stars, but you can’t see anything. Suddenly, a bright light appears from far away and seems to be accelerating towards you. 11: It’s the spaceship that froze the city in amber! What do they want? Why are they here now? They finally come out of their ship after landing, and speak to you and your friends. They tell you that they froze the people and animals to protect them from dangerous solar flares that the human scientists hadn’t detected. Had they left them alone, they would’ve instantly died. You ask them to remove the amber now that the solar flares are over, and they agree. However, they will have to leave right after that, in order not to scare the people off. You are given a paper that you should only look at after they’ve left. 12: They get into their spaceship and fire up a huge sonic blaster. It transmits a supersonic frequency that removes all of the amber in the city, and everyone is free once again. As the supersonic frequency faded away, the spaceship disappeared in the darkened void of the sky. 13: Now everyone’s up and talking, but there’s a huge problem: all of the amber has escaped the city and drifted towards the sea, and now the sea is polluted. You check your paper and find that the aliens left you a song to sing to clean the sea. It will only work if enough people sing the song. But how much is enough? 14: The people of the city find this whole song thing a little bit ridiculous and pathetic, to say the least. It takes you a lot of convincing to win them over, and finally everyone agrees to sing together. 15: Everyone from the city sings the song together, and the amber disappears in an orange glow. Humanity sings its first alien song, and behold: not only did the amber disappear, but the sick were healed, the old and tired died peacefully, and the city was aglow.
(That’s it. I switched around the order of tracks 8 and 9 to make the story flow better. I know it’s not well-written at all, but the point is to convey what I’m imagining, and not to write a proper story. It’s closer to a waking dream than to a fully-realized dream, I think. Meh. It’s a little bit over the top, but that’s what I want from it… something a young boy would imagine.)
This story has nothing to do with the album itself musically or lyrically, although I could find/create some links if I wanted to. Anyways, here’s to a great album from a great artist. Final thought: the album art fits the album perfectly.