Patrick Ames – Great Bunch of Molecules

From the LP “The Virtualistics”.
Music produced by Jon Ireson. Video produced by BlueCafeMusic.com.

The topic is odd I know but I’ve always been fascinated with the fact that your body really does replace itself every seven years. Now I just made it into a song, that’s all, a song about whomever constitutes me is being replaced and we’ll miss it/you/we/us. It really illustrates that twenty years ago I was really a different person. A totally different set of cells. I do admit a certain delight in rhyming biology terms in a musical melody.

The song is about spaces. Just like molecules are all about the spaces between atoms holding the molecule together. The repetitive space that repeats the simple melody and the long silences in between verses just reminded me of the spaces molecules must have. I first recorded the whole song with voice and guitar and then went in again and recorded each separately, both in a single live cut and then sent that off to Jon. Jon plays the other guitars and a bass that has some sweet touches of harmony. His mix board on my voice adds the reverb and depth of yet again, another space — so well that I expect to hear someone cough during the long pauses.

Jon Ireson, Producer says: “This is my favourite track on the LP and it’s the one with the most sparse production. Patrick brought it to me fairly late in the process and was a little unsure of how to frame it. I said: just get out of its way! Let the song speak for itself. He came up with these great contemplative lyrics from this unconventional perspective. I thought it was brilliant. So I left a lot of space for the words to hang. I added some countermelody in the guitar to give it a tag line and backed it with acoustic bass but I was committed to let the theme do the heavy lifting. I think it turned out really well.”

Here’s the lyrics:
Great Bunch of Molecules
© 2021 by Patrick Ames. All Rights Reserved.
1.
You replace yourself every seven years
Millions of molecules, toes to ears
Lipoproteins, long-chains of fats
What holds us all together, have you thought about that?
What a great bunch of molecules we have been
We’ve stuck together all along, whether fat or thin
2.
We’ve been so sick we couldn’t cry
We’ve felt so bad we wanted to die
We talked mitochondria out of suicide
Remember that hangover when we were 35? \
What a great group of molecules we have been
We’ve stuck together all along, shared the oxygen
3.
We’ve seen a lot together, my biochemical pathways
Following the plans of twining DNA
It’s gonna be strange when we drift apart
And my dear dear liver, you worked so hard
What a great group of molecules we have been
It won’t be the same, when we replace us again