A Tune Musings Special: 6 Underappreciated Space-Themed Songs You Should Hear
Tune Musings is a regular series where a lifelong audiophile shares, dissects and reviews lesser-known, beautiful music.
“Electricity comes from other planets” — Lou Reed, 1968
Space, once famously dubbed the ultimate frontier, has been in the news recently. A Congressional subcommittee convened earlier this summer to hear testimony from several military officers who allege the government is concealing evidence of UFOs.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just imaged the most distant star ever detected. India became the first nation in history to successfully land a probe on the Moon’s South Pole. The exploration of space is again in the midst of some exciting developments.
If you are like me (a lifelong space junkie and lazy amateur astronomer), there is never enough new, revelatory information about the universe beyond our planet’s Karman line. As our species uncovers more data about our shared cosmic realities, I find myself accumulating more questions about its origin, framework, and eventual fate.
Space sometimes seems massive beyond any comprehension. It's limitless, and the distances between stars and galaxies confound and astound. Space is also frightening as hell (astrophobia is a real thing). The dark voids beyond our comfortable Earthly borders exist in a menagerie of beautiful desolation.
Despite space’s cold and unfathomable mystery, human beings have been singing songs about it since time immemorial. Every genre of music includes ditties, symphonies, and ballads inspired by and/or dedicated to the cosmos. The following tracks are just a few of the offbeat pieces that frequently orbit the center of my turntable.
“Moon Fever” — Air (2012)
No recent electronic-based instrumental feels spacier to me than Air’s piano-led composition “Moon Fever,” a standout track from the French duo’s excellent Le voyage dans la lune, itself inspired by Georges Melies’ 1902 creepily effective science fiction film A Trip to the Moon.
“Moon Fever” features a haunting marriage of synthesizer and artificial strings, rocketed by an otherworldly piano melody that captures the eerie whimsy of the French director’s seminal black and white movie about a group of astronomers voyaging to Earth’s satellite in a cannon-propelled capsule. Melies’ film is as easily recommendable as the Air album inspired by it 110 years later.
C’est magnifique.
“UFO” — Jim Sullivan (1969)
Folk singer Jim Sullivan’s orchestral ode to alien traffic, a title cut from his debut 1969 LP, found its way into my heavy rotation recently, thanks in part to aforementioned news events. “U.F.O.” rolls along with an atmospheric swagger buffeted by a killer horn chorus and unique astro-phonic sounds while Sullivan obsesses over the origin of the song’s enigmatic visitors:
I’m checkin’ out the show
With a glassy eye
Looking at the sun dancing through the sky
Did he come by UFO?
A lifelong extraterrestrial buff, Jim Sullivan’s story is itself a mystery of near-cosmic proportions. Born in San Diego, Sullivan took up music to escape dire poverty. He became a steady gigger in the Los Angeles bar scene during the 60s. Sullivan became friends with Hollywood icons Lee Marvin and Harry Dean Stanton and even appeared as an extra in Easy Rider. Sadly, his recording career sputtered almost as soon as it began; neither one of the two records he made during his lifetime made a dent in the charts, and his failures helped propagate problems with alcohol.
Jim Sullivan disappeared while driving his VW Beetle in New Mexico in 1975. His car was found, but his body never was. He literally vanished without a trace at the age of 34. His bizarre fate helped resurrect his music from obscurity, however…and U.F.O. was eventually reissued in 2010.
“Space Girl” — Frances Forever (2020)
Frances Forever’s endearing ballad to an outer spaced based love interest isn’t exactly obscure. The 2020 release became a viral TikTok sensation, garnering well over 10 million streams. Still, despite its initial success, Forever is not exactly a household name, and the song appears to have crossed into black hole territory in the past few years. So I am featuring it here, hoping to pull it back from the brink of supernova-ed annihilation.
“Space Girl” is a near-perfect piece of bedroom pop. Forever sweetly incorporates several dozen cosmological references within the space of four minutes (from galaxies to lunar eclipses to constellations), charmingly utilized in a poetic love letter propelled by a singsong melodic rhythm. My favorite portion of “Space Girl” is the stunning coda, in which Forever breathlessly laments the ever-increasing spatial distance to their paramour, reflected in the downtempo fade that conjures images of two atoms slowly being pulled away by gravitational forces beyond their control.
Give it a listen, and let me know if you’re not uplifted by the song’s infectious projectile appeal.
“Benson Arizona” —written by John Carpenter and Bill Taylor* (1974)
“Benson Arizona” is the song that kicks off the very surreal sci-fi black comedy film Dark Star, released to little fanfare in 1974. Dark Star is director John Carpenter’s first motion picture, mostly filmed while he was a student at the University of Southern California in the early 70s. Co-written by (and starring) fellow USC Trojan Dan O’Bannon, Dark Star remained largely forgotten until Carpenter and O’Bannon achieved later cinematic success in the late 70s with Halloween and Alien, respectively. Dark Star received greater critical revisiting thanks in part to the film’s eventual reissues on VHS and laserdisc the following decade, and it remains a cult classic to this day.
Dark Star tells the story of a small crew of astronauts aboard a dank, cramped spaceship twenty years into their mission, searching deep space for unstable planets to nuke from orbit. Over the course of the film, the crew find themselves simultaneously battling sentient bombs, mission fatigue, increasingly worrying technical malfunctions, and a stowaway alien species that (due to the film’s very minimal budget) looks like a half-inflated orange beach ball with claws. Underlying the movie’s absurdity is a thick foundation of appreciation for mankind’s eccentricities in the face of danger and death.
“Benson Arizona,” co-written by Carpenter and Bill Taylor and originally sung by John Yeager, fits the film like a perfectly snug EVA helm. It’s a spacefarer’s country-fried lamentation for his distant home and distant love. Like the characters in the film, the singer rues the astronomically sized separation from “desert skies” and his lover’s “cool touch in the night.” The stellar chorus is impossible to resist participating in, especially once it inevitably takes up permanent residence in your brain:
Benson, Arizona, blew warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona, the same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder when we watched them, you and I
*I should note that while the original version of “Benson Arizona” featuring John Yeager is streamable online, I find the fidelity lacking in every video. I am linking to the equally enjoyable re-recorded version by Dominik Hauser instead:
“Andromeda” — Weyes Blood (2019)
Fun, brain-meltingly ridiculous facts: the Andromeda Galaxy is the closest galaxy to ours. It is located roughly 2.5 million light years from the Solar System. It has a diameter of around 46.56 kiloparsecs. If the galaxies stood still, it would take someone from Earth about 10 billion years to reach Andromeda using the best propulsion methods currently available (Space is big).
Andromeda is also the name of one of my most cherished songs of 2019: a slow-tempo soft rock dirge from Doylestown, PA-raised singer-songwriter Weyes Blood (non-stage name: Natalie Mering). The second track from her critical smash LP Titanic Rising, “Andromeda” is a song that utilizes the severe physical distances between galaxies (see above) as a metaphor for emotional hesitancy. Mering grounds her musings on the complexities of romantic uncertainty in the beginning verse:
Andromeda’s a big, wide open galaxy
Nothing in it for me except a heart that’s lazy
Running from my own life now
I’m really turning some time
Looking up to the sky for something I may never find
Sung warmly over a steady LinnDrum beat and accentuated by hazy slide guitars, “Andromeda” recalls peak country rock-era Linda Ronstadt. It oozes the kind of Southern California vibes that produced much of what was later called AM Gold. Except, in Mering’s hands, “Andromeda” attains a level of sophistication that crosses several magnitudes of artistry.
“Twin Stars of Thence” — Sun Ra (1978)
Deliberately excluding the original extraterrestrial maestro from a list of space-themed music should be a crime punishable by airlock expulsion. There was no way I would not feature Sun Ra in this article. He claimed to be an alien from Saturn sent on a mission of interplanetary peace.
The earthling born Herman Poole Blount was one of music’s most influential weirdos. While nominally a “jazz musician,” Sun Ra transcended all genres of 20th-century music, incorporating a widely eclectic and avant-garde array of sound into his composition — ranging from jazz to ragtime and early New Orleans hot jazz, to swing music, bebop, free jazz, and fusion. When taken as a whole, Sun Ra’s enormous catalog can be summed up as a form of recorded sound as idiosyncratic as the man who birthed it: space music.
I could have included just about any part of his life’s work here, but lately, I have returned to his sometimes overlooked 1978 LP Lanquidity, where Sun moved towards a more R&B-infused sound.
My standout selection is “Twin Stars of Thence,” a nine-and-a-half minute boogey through interplanetary space that inspires mental fantasies of flying solo in a funkified spacecraft. The music feels tailor-made for admiring the star-kissed scenery, created for soundtracking a round trip journey to Europa, Titan, or some other astronomical vacation destination.
Lou Reed had it half right: much of Sun Ra’s music sounds like it came from other planets, not unlike the man himself. Space is indeed the place.
What are some of your favorite, underappreciated, or obscure space-flavored tunes? Let me know in the comments below.
Special thanks to Kevin Alexander
