The Sky

Ah, The Sky, this is the dreamscape (or maybe fever dream) track on the album where myth and machine collide. What I love about poetry and music is that its meaning can be so influenced by the listener (the observer). I suppose everything is. But truly, songs morph, bend, and interact in a cellular way. Abstract offerings, such as The Sky, have an especially ineffable nature.

I am here on Substack to talk about the meaning of the songs, and so I shall endeavor to do so, yet I fear that sharing my thoughts, that what the song offers will simply be tossed into the already heaping bin of AI lamentations. Alas.

The Sky weaves Delphi, Icarus, and the wreckage of a culture that sacrificed its soul to technology. In my mind, angels clash with winged cyborgs. The conflict is between the material and spiritual, the eminence of rote versus contextual thinking. Here, humanity has realized too late that it has abdicated too much to the machine, allowing it take over meaning making for us.

The lyric, “Thought you might have the questions to the answers that I’m holding in my mind,” speaks to this. Imbuing AI with the status of an oracle, friend, or advisor. Machines can mimic meaning but cannot know it. Why? On a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) level, many among us believe machines to be superior to us. After all, machines do not fear death. I don’t believe should either, but we do. That makes the idea of forever preserving our thinking functions on a sterile chip preferable to letting nature take its course.

The ticking clock you hear in the background throughout the track is there to signify the false heartbeat we have adopted - mechanical, relentless, drowning out our natural rhythm. I worry about how entrained even the most aware of us have become to all this. And I wonder if this is perhaps not the first time that humanity has stood at this very precipice.

In any case, I’m not going without a fight! The final song, The Road picks up on this theme to conclude the album.