New song: "Shovelin' Out the Front Door"
I belatedly want to say that was great to see and hear and hang out with everybody at Philcon last month: Marc Grossman, Roberta Rogow, H. Paul "Dr. SETI" Shuch, Mattie Brahen, Amy Fass, Kathy Sands, Mark Mandel (who I wish had been feeling better), Ariel Cinii, Murder Ballads, and of course Wen Spencer and all of the Pittsburgh folks who came out to support her. (Plus Bill Davis, with whom I rode up, and Steve Brinich and Crystal Paul, with whom Bill and I roomed.) I apologize for not making the open filking either night of the con, but I got very tired on both days and just didn't feel up to staying up any later than I did. I did manage to get another two songs done; the lyrics for the short one I wrote at the very last second for the songwriting contest -- the second one I've written imagining an alternate reality in which a 20th-century scientific miscalculation was correct -- are behind the cut.
“Shovelin’ Out the Front Door”
Lyrics and music written 11/22/15 by and ©2015 W. Randy Hoffman
For the “Footsteps on the Moon” Songwriting Contest at Philcon 2015
Inspired by Thomas Gold’s pre-Apollo miscalculations of the depth of lunar regolith
My suit smells like sweat as I wrangle this plow
I should’ve had sixty more tons moved by now
This regolith’s thick but goes over the rim
We’ll fill in this crater right up to the brim
We should be on Mars or Europa today
But this blanket of lunar soil lies in our way
If our solar system’s front door is the moon
Our roof is snowed in and we can’t wait for June...so we’re
[Chorus:]
Shovelin’ out the front door
Pushin’ the dust from our shore
We need a hard pan for the spacecraft to land
So we’re sweepin’ and sweepin’ some more
Armstrong and Aldrin are somewhere out there
Tombed in the dust of Tranquility Mare
The cost of their footprint was ungodly steep
It’s shaped like a module and fifteen feet deep
That tragedy shapes all our later work here
The drive to explore tempered with healthy fear
We’ll stop avalanches by moving the grime
And push our way outward one step at a time
(Chorus)
THE END*
*Note: I tacked a coda of “Go lunar galore” onto the original performance, which was dumb. I haven’t come up with anything better, so I’m posting the lyrics as shown here, without a coda (or a third verse, for that matter, which the song probably needs).
“Shovelin’ Out the Front Door”
Lyrics and music written 11/22/15 by and ©2015 W. Randy Hoffman
For the “Footsteps on the Moon” Songwriting Contest at Philcon 2015
Inspired by Thomas Gold’s pre-Apollo miscalculations of the depth of lunar regolith
My suit smells like sweat as I wrangle this plow
I should’ve had sixty more tons moved by now
This regolith’s thick but goes over the rim
We’ll fill in this crater right up to the brim
We should be on Mars or Europa today
But this blanket of lunar soil lies in our way
If our solar system’s front door is the moon
Our roof is snowed in and we can’t wait for June...so we’re
[Chorus:]
Shovelin’ out the front door
Pushin’ the dust from our shore
We need a hard pan for the spacecraft to land
So we’re sweepin’ and sweepin’ some more
Armstrong and Aldrin are somewhere out there
Tombed in the dust of Tranquility Mare
The cost of their footprint was ungodly steep
It’s shaped like a module and fifteen feet deep
That tragedy shapes all our later work here
The drive to explore tempered with healthy fear
We’ll stop avalanches by moving the grime
And push our way outward one step at a time
(Chorus)
THE END*
*Note: I tacked a coda of “Go lunar galore” onto the original performance, which was dumb. I haven’t come up with anything better, so I’m posting the lyrics as shown here, without a coda (or a third verse, for that matter, which the song probably needs).
