In 2014 I was in a rock band. I remember we were all standing around in the studio after a rehearsal. Someone pulled up a YouTube video and said, “Have you guys heard this?” It was a revised version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” sung by astronaut Chris Hadfield on-board the International Space Station.
Well, this music moved me on so many levels. We all stood in awe and delight of Hadfield’s homage to Bowie. He twirled his guitar and floated through the capsule at zero gravity. But, it was when I closed my eyes and listened to the strangely beautiful musical breaks in Bowie’s song, where the lyrics dropped out, that I could hear the musical equivalent of an awesome, celestial fly-over of the planet. Well, this took me back to the first time my big brother turned me on to Bowie during a camping trip. He loaned me a walkman and headphones and I remember having that same feeling of almost taking off while hiking through the woods. There was something almost transcendent about the feeling of gliding across space while listening to that woozy movement in the song. This too seemed like one of those indelible experiences forever etched on my brain.
Back in 2014, no one knew that David Bowie would pass away in 2016. I didn’t know that my brother would pass away from cancer the same year. I like to think that the door just somehow opened and took some of the best people that year and that my brother, a rocker, would have been in good company.
My name is Johannah Harkness and this is music that literally moves me. I am the song writer for “One Way Trip To Mars,” a rock opera, dedicated to my brother, set to premiere at the Waterville Opera House this August.