This song languished in a scraps folder for many months, but suddenly it came to life - as songs often do without much intervention from me.

There are songs that you mean to be short, those you mean to be long, and those that you think are going to be short but then turn out to be seven minutes long despite being fairly basic A-B-A-B-C-B structures. So I'm not sure exactly how that happened - but the solo section has something new, because an experiment with some more recording led this to be my first Modplug song featuring guest guitars by me. Paradoxically.

I don't know if I have much more to say on the subject of this song, which should be fairly blatant, but I wonder if it will raise any questions in the comments - I didn't really know where it was going for a while and then suddenly loved the irony when I hit on it. The icon image is one that's around a lot on the Internet, but seems to originally have come from NASA and is a photograph from the Hubble telescope of the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy. It's a spectacular arrangement of stars with a vague cross of dust in the middle which, because of our human conditioning, our eyes are tempted to interpret as a figure.

Lyrics

Despite all human reason

We believe a voice unheard

Look back a thousand years ago

And cling on to those words

Believing all our wonders

Are miracles from god

Now those who only trust the dead

Are holding back the world

With blinded eyes

What used to be our knowledge

Is now a heresy

We're branded all as skeptics

By the ones who don't believe

What happened to the world

And the future we were told

Every time we dare to take a step

A raging storm unfolds

Blindly they look to the sun

There's no chosen one

A star that will never come

Turn your eyes down to your dying world

Over blackened sands

To the boiling sea

Fighting the world forever

Have we seen the apex of our time

We all believed we could change the world

In an age that never came

Sailing the acid ocean

Evolution of our world denied

Just once for them, would you send a sign

A chance for all mankind

A signal from the sky

Father, if you're out there

Would you speak to them again

A voice to find, to free their mind

From confirmation's pain

And save us from delusions

Of the ones who saw the light

Those who see the world

In perfect black and white

Blindly they look to the sun

There's no chosen one

A star that will never come

Turn your eyes down to your dying world

Over blackened sands

To the acid ocean

Fighting the world forever

Have we seen the apex of our time

We all believed we could change the world

In an age that never came

Sailing the acid ocean

Evolution of our world denied

Just once for them, would you send a sign

A chance for all mankind

A signal from the sky

Power, greed, corruption

Hate disguised as love

Leading to temptation

Those we're meant to trust

Righteous persecution

Human rights denied

All for what the ancient madmen

Saw in ghosts up in the sky

Somewhere up through the madness

Hatred and violence

Blinded in misery

Beacons bright in the darkness

Shining in silence

Just for the ones who choose to see

Oh, we're fighting the world forever

Have we seen the apex of our time

We all believed we could change the world

In an age that never came

Sailing the acid ocean

The potential of us all denied

Just once for them, would you send a sign

A chance for all mankind

An answer for the blind

A signal from the sky

A signal from the sky