The Grandeur Is No Delusion

At first listen, Silicone Boone’s The Reaches reminds me more of a cosmic journey than anything I’ve ever listened to – and that’s intentional. Boone describes the record as a “space concept album” and some of the songs can be traced as far back as 2002, when he heard Coldplay’s Politik and said, “But what if it was about space?” Indeed, this album sonically is reminiscent of the arena rock of Coldplay and The Killers, with Boone’s eastern Kentucky vocal delivery coming as a bit of a surprise. Several songs seem fitting for a climactic scene in a space film. But to reduce this album to soundtrack fodder would be a disservice to what it most earnestly attempts to do: stop you in your tracks and make you care. It’s an ambitious aim, and so Boone draws upon that most ambitious, most enigmatic source: the universe, and humanity’s role within it. Bookended by the Big Bang and Universal Death, The Reaches cries out, leaving the listener provoked by the same questions that Boone asks, answers, doubts, and asks again. Make no mistake, this is a deeply human piece of art; the setting of the songs is celestial, but the subject is profoundly personal. There are no delusions here, the grandeur is real.

The Reaches was released late last year, but the analysis contained in this article is the fruit of many hours of listening, conversations with friends, and a recent phone call that I had with Boone. In our discussion, we talked at length about varying interpretations of the songs on The Reaches. In fact, he told me that some of my analysis was slightly different than his own – and that this difference is a compliment! A true piece of art is much more than a riddle that becomes boring the moment it is ‘solved’. Instead, a masterpiece like The Reaches invites the listener to consider many possibilities, to wonder why, and ultimately to fashion a little meaning for themselves. Allow this piece to serve as a companion for the record, but certainly not as a definitive explanation to its meaning.

Borne

The Reaches opens with a bang – literally. Borne, an ode to the beginnings of the universe, intertwines the Big Bang and the Genesis account in anticipatory verse. All of Creation, from this first moment of existence, “is trembling with glory”, awaiting the coming of Adam. Note also the spelling of borne – with an “e”. This use of the word means ‘carried by’, causing the lyric “we were borne in a surge of flame” to retain an element of the unknown. We were not born out of this spectacular instant; what Boone is suggesting is that there is something within us that existed before Creation. The surge of flame is how we were brought into the world, but perhaps something predated the Big Bang.

Mars 

If Borne was about the week of Creation, Mars takes a square look at the consequences of the Fall. The Roman god of war and agriculture, after whom the planet was named, is a particularly apt metaphor for the contents of the song. In the verses of Mars, using Old Testament imagery, the red planet is a provocation to the people of history who beat golden warheads from silver plowshares, “seeing themselves” in violence and bloodshed. As descendants of Cain, we all seem to be cursed to this destiny. But in the chorus, Boone cries out for the salvation of mankind: “Red the moon will turn / Red the sun will burn / May your side break wide and flood the curse”. He continues, using agricultural imagery to bring the history of humanity full circle: 

“Across the naked plains 

We’ve come to trade our ways 

And go down, down like seeds to die and turn

We trade in our wars

Let the curse be the cure

We pick up all our seed off the threshing floor…

Sow seeds of peace ‘cross your red fields of ore”

Mars, Silcone Boone

The chorus reminds me of an excerpt from Charles Péguy’s poem The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc. Narrating the experience of Mary as she followed her son to his crucifixion, Péguy paints a similar portrait of the paradox between our violent nature and the sacrifice of Christ:

“They even said: poor woman.

And at the same time they struck at her son.

Because man is like that.

Man is made that way.

The world is like that.

Men are what they are and you will never be able to change them. 

She did not know that on the contrary he had come to change man. 

That he had come to change the world.”

The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, Charles Péguy

In both the song and the poem, it is suggested that what seems to be the cruelty of human nature is actually not innate in us. From this, it follows that the significance of a savior is not to fundamentally alter what it means to be human but to restore us to a fuller humanity; a humanity that was always inside of us.

Found You 

The beginning of this record is a strength, as the first two songs crescendo into Found You, an ode to humanity’s desire to reach beyond – towards a transcendent love, a higher power, or a scientific discovery. Boone sings the verses with an undeniable longing and the energy of the chorus, backed by a choir, culminating in a listening experience that seems to overfill the room. What the character in this song finds is left open to interpretation, but Boone wrote the song imagining being the first to discover life beyond Earth. “I wanted it to feel like gospel [music] because I wanted the impression that a discovery like extraterrestrial intelligence would, in fact, be like a gospel. It would be like a conversion experience. It would be a change in the trajectory of human history.” 

In a theme explored further in the coming songs, Boone also spoke about the magnitude of the universe and the smallness we feel in comparison: 

“None of us want to be insignificant, but all of us know what it’s like to feel insignificant. None of us want to be alone, but we know what it’s like. It’s interesting to me that if a person lingers under the stars for any length of time, they experience both of these emotions. So why don’t we walk away from stargazing depressed and anxious? Maybe it’s the scale of it all. We sense space holding up the reality of our insignificance like a giant drape in one hand but slyly reaching behind us and slipping another idea into our minds with its other hand.”

Europa 

Europa seems to be a warning for the “science will save us” positivism that is dominant in secular culture today. Positivism, as a philosophical principle, seems incredibly optimistic: every assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of mathematical proof. But what did positivism lead to? Political, systematic solutions to profoundly human problems. To quote T.S. Eliot’s The Rock, “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” But what happens when science doesn’t save us, when we fall short in our attempts to remedy suffering, failure, or morality? That is the question at the heart of Europa. 

The song is a murder ballad, telling the tale of two astronauts who left earth for a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. After two years of space travel and another fourteen months of drilling, they find that the moon is barren. Their mission a failure, one astronaut, now without a purpose for living, murders his partner – and is haunted by her final words, the last he’ll ever hear, “I will live and will not die.” An idea is hinted with this bit of dialogue; a concept that is fleshed out later in the album: maybe there is something that survives even death.

Reaches (Hymn for Hominin)

Written as a tribute to astronomer Carl Sagan, Reaches imagines the experience of mankind looking at the stars throughout history, from the first endowed with a soul (“we awake in great wonder / limbs unfastened / aims unimagined”) to the humans of ages past, present, and future. Humanity’s greatest triumphs and gravest grievances have come and gone under the same canopy of stars; the constellations have seen millennia, their flickering presence the only constant. And yet somehow, they remain as paradoxically familiar and mysterious as they ever were. Within the experience of every person lying on their back under a dark sky is the wonder and kinship that Boone emotionally sings of, his voice far more subdued – settling in somewhere between a warble and yodel.

Diamond 

Diamond continues the exploration of the idea of a friendship with the stars, but on a far more personal level. As a kid, Boone used to go outside at night with his guitar and sing to the stars. Diamond sounds like a song written one of these nights, with different verses added over the years. Even in the chaos of growing up and heading into the world where every fire he builds seems to die, Boone can rely on his old friend, the diamond in his sky, to remind and reorient him towards something beyond himself.  Is this not a universal experience? Confronted by something so grand as millions of stars, all lightyears away, it seems as if our most human reaction is to implore. 

“I raise 

To meet the fullness of your gaze 

No, I will not temper this desire.

Would you light my way? 

Pierce the dark with your flame

Would you mark the way unknown?

Pierce the dark, lead me on”

Diamond, Silcone Boone

Whispered Flame 

Drawing from the same fiery language used in Borne, the next song on the record, Whispered Flame, contemplates the scientific fact that practically every element in the universe was formed in the heart of a star. As Carl Sagan once put it, “We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.” 

Whispered Flame’s simple acoustic arrangement might make it tempting to overlook this song, but the poetry of these lyrics explores this simple fact: not only are the monumental things made of stars, but so too are the insignificant. With this reminder, we can look again at the entire world with wonder; the hidden corners of creation contain all the glory of the infinitely expanding universe.

We’ll Fly Away

In my conversation with Boone, he told me that the song We’ll Fly Away is about the Fermi paradox, which points out the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and the high estimates for their probability. But the lyrics of We’ll Fly Away seem more earth-bound than any other song on the record. The way I understand it, the song is about the fact that – even though there’s this paradox and there must be life out there – we only have the life we’ve been given. And so, an experience of something like love interrupts the world that we’re living in our heads and changes our ideas about everything. Instead of these abstractions, really living the life we’ve got is the only way to ever go beyond the circumstances we were thrust into.

We’ll Fly Away is the closest thing this record has to a love song. In fact, I would say it’s really not written to a lover, but to love itself. Its presence in a space concept album might seem puzzling, but it reminds me of a story that Luigi Giussani used to tell. 

One night, Fr. Giussani was riding his bicycle through a ‘lover’s lane’ and he passed a couple who was kissing in the dark. When they saw him coming, they jumped apart, and he responded, “Excuse me, but if you weren’t doing anything wrong you should have just kept at it!” And then he looked up:

“and I saw the Milky Way with its light that wounds your heart like no other sensational light. I turned back to them and they were already grabbing each other again, poor things. I said, ‘Excuse me, for just one more moment: What does what you are doing have to do with the stars?’ ”  

This simple question cuts right to the core of We’ll Fly Away. In the pleading of the chorus, it’s proposed as a promise. To lock oneself in a lab and obsess over the possibilities of the Fermi paradox can quickly collapse into navel gazing, but to look up and fall in love (whether it’s with a person or the universe itself) is the only way to ever reach the stars. “Love’s a thing so dangerous / Come we’ll fly away / Our bodies rise like arrows in the sun / Reaching for the world we want.”

Borne II 

The Reaches closes with a dialogue between what Boone refers to as ‘Universal Death’ and ‘Consciousness’. The term Universal Death is a name for the most commonly accepted theory of the universe’s eventual demise: as the universe continually expands, it will cool, eventually reaching a temperature too cold to sustain any form of life. This poetic culmination of the Big Bang, where all of existence once was contained in one blinding, burning instant, is the setting of the song. Universal Death, in pessimistic verse, insists that Consciousness must die too. “Come and rest your fears, O and die with me / All would be the same had you never came / None are left aware, were you ever there?” 

But if this album has gestured towards anything, it’s that we’re not alone. Call it God, call it the ether, call it aliens, call it what you like – Boone calls it Consciousness, a reality that refuses to die. “Yes, like you I am dust but unlike you I’m steaming, breathing, wreathing dream upon dream”. Universal Death tries to get the last word, but the final three and a half minutes of this record insist otherwise. In a feeble prayer, Consciousness calls back to its beginning, in what sounds like a cosmic version of life flashing before its eyes. 

But then the guitar comes in, the tempo picks up, and it all crescendos into a reach for transcendence. Is Consciousness – is humanity – made of something Ultimate, made for something more? Boone doesn’t do us the disservice of giving an answer. Instead, as the music fades out and silence returns, you have to decide for yourself.