Today's entry is part of #TuneTuesday over on mastodon and the theme is #MotherEarth

I won't pretend to be a particularly imaginative man (in fact I have aphantasia so I'm one of the least imaginative people you know... probably) so my choice is... Mother Earth by Within Temptation

I discovered WT at University from some of my dorm friends and I've been a huge fan of them and Delain ever since.

Mother Earth is a catchy epic metal track which starts with a gentle flute intro and picks up the pace fairly quickly with a driving guitar riff and a full orchestral accompaniment. When it starts in earnest, it makes me want to headbang and I don't have enough hair to do that properly...

It's a classic earth worship hit and a great example of WT's earlier, "raw" sound. Sharon Den Adel's vocals are haunting and "fae" and the lyrics are about the power and inscrutability of Mother Nature

Birds and butterflies Rivers and mountains she creates But you'll never know The next move she'll make You can try But it is useless to ask why Cannot control her She goes her own way

This is a staple of my late teens and early 20s and I remember on the couch lying in my first apartment during my internship looking out at the mist in the communal garden with this album on in the background.

On Tuesday I take part in the #TuneTuesday challenge on mastodon.

Today's theme is space walks...

I'm going with Joe Satriani's cover of Sleep Walk originally by Santo and Johnny. To me, this song oozes space cowboy. Imagine you're out on the hull of your ship in deep space doing maintenance welds listening to this in the background.

I love Satch's cover which gives the original a slightly more modern feel but the original is great too.

What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently?

I've been spending a lot of time with Cory Wong's Starship Syncopation album and the titular track. It's perfect concentration music and I always love these collab projects with the Metropole Orkest like the one that snarky puppy did a few years back.

This also answers yesterday's what music helps you concentrate too since there are no lyrics. I can just enjoy the soundscape or pair it with a book or a programming task.

What’s your favorite collaboration between artists?

That's a tough question. I think there are a lot of really good collaborations out there to celebrate so I'm caveatting this with the fact that it's my favorite collaboration that came to mind right now. I'll probably think of another one later and be all like "damn, I wish I'd thought of that".

I'm going with Time Stand Still by Rush which featured vocals from Aimee Mann.

I'm a huge fan of Rush, I'd put them up there as my, overall, favourite band of all time. They are certainly my most listened band as my last.fm profile would tell you.

This is a song about how it's important to stop and just enjoy the moment. Something that in our modern, always-connected-to-the-internet world, can be easy to forget. Life moves fast, things change, the things we enjoy slip away from us and it's important that we slow down and enjoy them. Something I'm coming to appreciate a lot more in my mid-30s. Particularly poignant today, the day before my birthday.

Summer’s going fast–
Nights growing colder
Children growing up —
old friends growing older
Experience slips away…

The composition of the song is relatively typical for 80s and 90s Rush. It's layered, its melodic, there's a catchy synthesizer hook with a sort of dizi sound applied to. There's complex drums from Peart. There's a dynamic bassline from Lee. There's even a short instrumental section (ok so that's less typical for Rush).

I also love the now dorky-seeming music video which shows the band members and Mann superimposed against various backgrounds and occasionally cuts them out and has them flying around the screen.

10/10 track would Rush again.

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?

It has to be The Logical Song by Supertramp.

Supertramp are one of my all-time favourite bands and this song speaks to me on many levels. On the one hand, my dad used to play Breakfast in America for me all the time - he had it on LP and that synthesizer intro just immediately sends me back to the mid 90s.

Secondly the lyrics, originally penned by Roger Hodgson about his time away at boarding school speak to me too. I spent a lot of my life right through into my mid-20s chasing academic success and getting a PhD was the be-all and end-all for me. I had a very tech-bro attitude towards society and I assumed that we could solve all social problems by being logical and sensible but I learned that human beings and society are not that simple and that the important things in life are love and acceptance.

Thirdly, the sax on this track is great. Helliwell does an amazing job of playing what seems like an improved outro which is melodically relatively simple but has bite and attitude.