Lift Up Your Hearts!

I've often said that the 1960's were a miserable decade. Not for me, personally: a healthy family life protected me from dangers I only recognized years later. Plus, the excitement of the space program and my own love of science fiction kept me optimistic despite the insanity raging around me. But looking back at that time makes me realize that the rot I observe today has its roots set firmly in the 60's and early 70's.

Being at the age of nostalgia, sights, sounds, and events from my childhood will sometimes pop, unbidden, into my mind, and so it was with the song, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon." It debuted in 1965, written by a 20-year-old Cambridge University student named Jonathan King. It became a hit, and I fell in love with it. Most people these days have no idea what it was like to keep the radio on solely for the purpose of catching a favorite song when it played; there was not Alexa to fetch music on demand, and my budget did not allow for buying more than a handful of records.

One day, this song came back to me, and I wondered if I could hear it again. YouTube to the rescue! It's embarrassing to hear the bizarre lyrics again and wonder about my adolescent tastes: but adolescence can do strange things to people, and that time period was the most bizarre and outlandish I ever knew—until the last 10 years took insanity exponentially higher.

To the best of my knowledge, none of my friends shared my love of the song, nor had I heard any mention of it in the intervening 60 years until I searched it out on YouTube. Still, it was fun to rediscover the song, and to realize that as absurd as they are, the lyrics are poetical and have meaning if you're in the right mood.