DESCRIPTION:
"Fragments" - Track 9 from the new album "Going Somewhere" by Scott Albert Johnson
ORDER NOW: http://scottalbertjohnson.com/goingsomewhere

Walker Percy once wrote in The Moviegoer, "Not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder." That’s pretty much the way I feel all the time: in awe of Creation and Infinity and very much unsure of what it all means (but grateful for the chance to be here to consider it at all). I wanted to try to capture this feeling in a song about the fundamentals of who we are and where we are going. The essential ideas I had were "connectedness" and "distance," and the paradox of how both concepts are fundamental to our being.

The lyrics were influenced by such thinkers as Frank Tipler, Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Nick Bostrom, St. Augustine and Alan Watts, among others. Chalmers Davis came to me with a beautiful chord sequence. Once I heard that, the melody and lyrics wrote themselves, and it was an honor to be able to co-write this with him. We recorded this in the beautiful-sounding Center for Performing Arts at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (my alma mater) in Ridgeland, Mississippi.

The video expands on this idea of distance and connectedness, and how they are really the same thing, whether on a cosmological, microscopic, or human scale.

LYRICS:
I’m sleeping underneath the evening sky
I’m dreaming of a place far from now
Imagining you, right here by my side
Not taking time to wonder why or how

And up above, the stars are shining through
Lighting up a dark and ghostly screen
But you don’t see them quite the way I do
You’re looking at the spaces in between

Are we just a simulation
Of someone else’s meditation
Fragments of a deeper situation?

And somewhere up there, I can almost see
A place just like the one under my feet
With someone just like you, and just like me
Walking down an unfamiliar street

In a place that died ten million years ago
An ancient galaxy without a name
I take a look at you, and I know
The distance is exactly the same

Are we just an improvisation?
A divine hallucination?
Fragments in eternal acceleration?

And then the dream awoke and I was here
Alone again… looking at the sky
The separation is all too clear
And so we send our rockets way up high

But it’s all the same creation
Endless information
Fragments with an unknown destination

I’m sleeping underneath the evening sky…

CREDITS:
SAJ: vocals and harmonica Chalmers Davis: piano

Recorded at the Center for Performing Arts, St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Ridgeland, Mississippi. Engineered by Tim Cotton. Mixed by Randy Everett and SAJ. Mastered by Randy Everett.