The Sky Is Calling

So I sit down to go through my email, and it's the usual slew of press releases, spam, space enthusiast questions, and marriage proposals. No, wait, I don't get those last ones. Still, it's a lot of email.

But one catches my eye. The subject line is "Space Pop". Just that. Huh. So I click it, and right away I know I was about to be happy.

The opening line is, "I'm a fan. Of you. Of space. Of inspiring curiosity about science."

I love hearing that. The email is from Kim Boekbinder, an independent pop music artist, and she wants to make a space album. Or more accurately an album of music based on and inspired by space and astronomy, and in the email she's asking me to be an advisor on it (along with Matt Everingham). She also links to her first song from the album: "The Sky Is Calling". I listen to it, and I'm hooked.

Here's the song:

I know, right? Kim's awesome. By the way, she fed an image of the Tarantula nebula through an audio program to create the background for that song. So, yeah.

Kim's raising funds to get this album [wait for it, wait for it] off the ground [hahahahahaha! I kill me], so she's got a Kickstarter page for it. As I write this she's already more than 1/3 of the way to her goal of $30k, which is great! I'd really like to see this album get made. She and I have been chatting back and forth, and every time I send her some astronomy note, she gets really excited and wants to write music about it.

So if you can, kick in some filthy lucre for her. I'll note that when she got to $5k she wrote a short and quick song based on a post I wrote about the expansion of the Universe. Seriously. And when she got to $10k she wrote a short song about Mars Rovers.

If you want a taste of more of her music, she has some you can listen to on her website. Note: One of them is massively NSFW. You'll know when you get to it.

The past couple of years has seen a lot of artists looking to include more science in their work (see Related Posts below). Maybe that's always been there, but what I know is that recently they started contacting me. I think that's fantastic. After all, isn't a Hubble picture art? Doesn't seeing a photo from Curiosity make your heart beat a little faster? Doesn't something like this pluck at the wires connecting the two halves of your brain?

Science and art are inextricably linked, and I'm more than happy to help more people solidify that connection. So thanks, Kim, for your unabashed love of science. I hope we make beautiful music together.