Flying the Body Home

Listening back to this one, I was struck by a trio of mental images.

The first was a memory from a flight back from some business trip. The clouds and the angle of the sunlight formed what looked like a blasted landscape over which towered a gargantuan, misshapen edifice, a dark gray Cyclopean temple bathed in deep scarlet. It’s one of the most striking images that I’d like to be able to beam from my brain into some other medium.

The second image was a memory of a flight out of LAX (perhaps the same flight where the previous image occurred), where we flew some distance out over the Pacific Ocean to gain altitude before turning back east.

The final mental image is of a single person on an otherwise empty COVID-era flight, accompanying a body back home for burial.

All of those images, along with the title, popped into my head as I listened to the full track for the first time. When I told my wife the proposed title, she said she got a lump in her throat, imagining a similar scene as the one that had occurred to me.

I’m especially pleased with those last two chords - a much-needed resolution after the garbled mess of the previous fifteen minutes, and probably the most satisfying chord change (to my ear, anyway) that I’ll ever produce.