Chris Hadfield

A little over a year ago, PaisleyTunes celebrated the 1977 release into space of a golden platter, inscribed with earthly symbols, logic, and etched with the sounds of the earth, humanity gambling on the slim odds that ET will have built something between a Victrola-1 and a Technics SL-1210MK5. It’s still floating and we’re still hopeful.

A most unexpected visit

In early April of 2013, almost a year later, still waiting patiently for a postcard, we received a visit from space.

As we investigated further, we began to understand a whole new brand of audience. Readers who are shut inside a tin-can, listeners who are limited to governmental channels, viewers who have only been online since 2010 and have a lot of catching up to do.  With this unique audience in mind, we’ve spent some time focusing on new, space-appropriate content, reaching out to artists who contend with the emotional roller-coster of a 3G shuttle launch and the solitude of the stars.

Chris Hadfield

Searching through archives of sailor song writers, rail-roader singers, & The Beach Boys for the best answer to our quest for content, we floated toward David Robert Jones and his psychedelic glam-rock. A story teller for the Astronaut generation and banner carrier for freedom of the confined, he became our obvious link between earth and sky. Yet we still had only a subtle superficial connection.

Enter Chris Hadfield, a Canadian who’s produced videos akin to your college roommate deep in a tray of brownies, your favorite tech-savvy handyman, or a buddy’s ‘look at me now tape‘. Yet what best connects this 53 year old Canuck to our end-game is his musical aptitude and his career. Turns out, farm kids from Sarnia, Ontario can grow up to be astronaut singer-songwriters. At least Chris did.

Graduating high school the same year Voyager and it’s precious cargo departed our atmosphere, he set his sights high and flew, eventually becomming a test pilot and then a NASA engineer. Since December, Chris has begun to focus on distributing music from space, releasing his first song recorded in space, Jewel in the Night. While we’re not all too impressed with a little at-altitude-recording, we are impressed that he’s gamed the government into paying him overtime-hazard pay to do it.  Yet MOST impressive is is release this week of the First music video from space, (not to be confused with Sugar Ray’s 1997 video) covering, with appropriate modifications, David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

So, from Chris, for Chris, Thanks Chris.

*It is rumored that he’s working on his first at-altitude-studio album. We’ll be sure to keep you abreast of it’s release.