It’s always a gift when the feeling instilled by another songwriter’s composition inspires me to write a song based solely on my emotional response to that song. It’s hard to explain, but that was the case with Galileo.
While on a writer’s retreat in northern Minnesota, I was introduced to the music of singer/songwriter Patty Larkin by another writer from New York. I was immediately taken with Patty’s music – especially her lyric content and wonderful acoustic guitar work. One of her songs was a haunting story about a sailor who dies at sea. I was drawn to the hypnotic feel of her guitar work and found myself experimenting with finger picking patterns in open tunings that engendered that same hypnotic feel. However, instead of trying to create a rhythmic roll of the ocean, I found my patterns projecting me into space.
I had just finished reading a biography of Galileo and his life story was still very fresh in my mind. Despite his brilliance in mathematics, physics and astronomy, the Catholic Church placed him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life for what they considered to be his heretical position that the earth was not the center of our universe.
I took 359 years, but In October of 1992, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for their wrong doing.
It is truly amazing to me that despite advances and discoveries over millenium, we still have disbelievers in science. I think Pope Paul may have summed it up best:
“An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.”
Galileo
I am Galileo and I am earthly bound
While heavenly bodies circle round and round
I feel just like a rock that’s imbedded in the ground
Sometimes when the moon is right
You can see a woman’s face
Illuminating all the hearts in space
While we struggle on this coil in this inhuman race
Haunted by the moon, bound to the sun
Is it written in the stars
Who we are and what we will become
Like Lucifer the Angel
Caught in a graceless fall
The gravity of sin still pulls us all
Weighted by the world, can heaven hear the call
I am Galileo and I am earthly bound
Galileo Galilei, Galileo Galilei…
Galileo is available as a single digital download and on the CD True Heart.