Galaxy, the second single from Dog Legs & Feet's upcoming album Bottom (A Live Collection), is what I'd call introspective alt-folk, maybe in the vein of Elliott Smith or The Tallest Man on Earth.
Although it was super easy to choose My Boots Are Achin' For Your Love as the first single, there were a lot of candidates for the second one. So why did Galaxy win out?
Primarily this: whenever I asked DLF fans - or even people who were not DLF fans - which song they thought would make a good single #2, every single person named this one. So the people have spoken!
About the Song
Galaxy started out as an instrumental guitar piece that I wrote in 1996-1997 while I was living in the UK. I moved there after I graduated from college. I got a six-month exchange worker visa (as opposed to exchange student) from BUNAC and I spent the six months working random jobs like pulling staples out of an insurance company's paper files so they could be scanned, or selling Oasis and Spice Girls CD's at Woolworth's. I didn't originally take a guitar with me, but after I'd been there for a few weeks I realized that was a mistake. I bought the cheapest one I could find at a pawn shop. It more than paid for itself in busking tips over the time I was there.
Galaxy started out as a kind of songwriting exercise: I was trying to make a song out of only chords that contained an F# (don't ask me why). So I came up with this jazzy progression that keeps hitting the F# over and over again with chords that are not necessarily in the same key, creating a feeling of a kind of persistent unanswered question. That feeling really captured a lot about my UK experience, which was sort of sweet and exciting and lonely all at once.
When DLF got together in the summer of 1997 to enter a songwriting contest, this was one of a handful of unfinished pieces I brought to the table. I thought it needed lyrics, but I just didn't know what exactly it was about.
Jon Watson came to the rescue. He wrote the words based on a conversation we had (probably in my parents' kitchen while we were waiting for someone else to record a part in the studio).
I told him about how, when I'd lived in England, I had kind of lost track of the news in the US. It wasn't until I came back to Texas in the spring of 1997 that I realized Carl Sagan had died some months before. He was one of my childhood heroes, and I felt an out-of-proportion sense of loss, amplified by the fact that I'd been walking around all this time not realizing he was gone.
Jon turned this into a melancholy song in which my ignorance (or innocence) makes me into a sort of psychopomp or limbo for Carl Sagan's soul, because to me he's still alive. This is layered onto a very JonWa-esque love story full of longing under the stars.
The final piece to come into place was the bridge, in which the band sings the refrain “outside it's raining” while I sing a counterpoint melody. In this we were definitely inspired by the Jayhawks song “Blue,” which has a bridge with two vocal lines singing counterpoint to each other.
The lyrics to my part of the bridge are adapted from a poem I'd written in college about watching the sky at night from the back seat of a car on a dark highway. “The moon too is a Marco Polo” fits right in with the overall theme of being stuck between worlds, and looking for connection across lonely distances that can feel as far apart as the stars.
In the conversation about what, if anything, we should change in re-releasing the album, this song is maybe the one where I had the strongest impulse to redo it from scratch. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because I just feel like it could sound great if it got really huge and super-produced, with drums and synths and strings and so on. As I've mentioned in other posts, we opted not to do that - but maybe we'll revisit this one in the future (especially if it gets jillions of downloads).
The single comes out Friday, April 7.
Credits
- Jon Watson: Lead vocal
- John Botti: Vocals, mandolin, owl bell
- Jeremy Edwards: Vocals, guitar
- Michael Mergen: Vocals, glockenspiel
- Joseph Trent: Vocals, Bass
- Live mixing and recording by Mars Hall and Toren Smith
- Produced by Jeremy Edwards
- Cover artwork by Jeremy Edwards, with images generated using Stable Diffusion AI.