Day 21: Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (with BJ Suter)

Lyrics:
She was a student of philosophy
He thought the world was flat
And the first time that they met
It caused a chain reaction
And their whole world exploded
Corroded
And blew their minds away

They were so far apart
The opposite polarity
They couldn't find a way
To bridge the disparity
Their whole world exploded
Corroded And blew their minds away

Again, again
We've blown our minds away again
In the end, in the end
If we can't find an ideal solution
The least we can do is get within
Six degrees of Francis Bacon

They agreed to meet for coffee
Negotiate
Found some common ground
It turned into a date
And their two worlds collided
Ignited
And blew their minds away

Now they understand
How opposites attract
The world is better when
Fiction's mixed with fact
Now we know
How to blend
If we can't find an ideal solution
The least we can do is get within
Six degrees of Francis Bacon

Details: I rent a room from BJ, and as a result we've written several songs together. Unlike most of the other co-writes I do, BJ and I use a certain amount of randomization to find our theme. We typically pull three random words from a dictionary, then pull passages from three random books. If we can combine all of the ideas, great, but if we're only inspired by a couple of them, that's fine, too. The words were solemnity, contrail and possessor. The passages included something about following an update schedule online, a job as a ski lift operator, and a quote from Francis Bacon. In this case, the Francis Bacon reference won out.

Francis Bacon is best known as the father of the scientific method. BJ likes to write songs about finding ways for humanity to get along. So we considered writing about a person who wanted to use science to bring people together, and we were going to use a lot of science words that had double meanings to that effect. I'm not sure it's that clear, but a lot of the lyrics are repurposed science terms. We also wanted to make a play on Francis Bacon's name, and ended up having him take the place of Kevin Bacon in that old game about connecting people.

The song is promoting the idea that, even if we can't agree on some things, we should still try to find some common ground and build relationships.

This took about 2.5 hours to write, but an hour to record.