• The only complete music album I know that actually focuses on the Night Sky is Priscilla Herdman’s wonderful 2009 album Into the Stars. (YouTube)  It is an inspired collection that celebrates the beauty of the night sky and the wonder of the universe that surrounds us, performed by a consummate singer. Herdman is known for her stunning vocals and her thoughtful selection of material and the rich production of each project and this album is a wonderful example of that. Herdman’s long time love of all things celestial and her fascination with the Hubble Space Telescope photographs led her to gather these songs which relate both literally and metaphorically to the universe and night sky. 
  The songs range from deeply emotional and romantic to playful and imaginative. Some take a narrative ballad approach (Underneath the Stars, Sail Away, Vincent, Ideas Are Like Stars), some connect to the theme more literally (Satellite Sky, The Galaxy Song, Pleiades, Blue Boat Home) and some poetically (The Play, Firefly Lights, Comet, The Moon’s Song).  You’ve heard some of these elsewhere, such as the hilarious “The Galaxy Song” by Monty Python’s Eric Idle, but Herdman’s  rich voice transforms the song into a more thoughtful, yet still humorous piece of music. (While talking about “The Galaxy Song,” don’t miss the version by cosmologist Stephen Hawking on his single “Stephen Hawking Sings Monty Python” (with Eric Idle’s version on the B-Side).)
  Songs on this album (links to YouTube):

• • • The Play Peter Mayer
    • Underneath The Stars Kate Rusby
    • Blue Boat Home Peter Mayer
    • Sail Away John McCutcheon
    • Pleiades Anne Hills
    • Satellite Sky Mark Heard
    • Firefly Lights Leslie Ritter & Scott Petito
    • Vincent Don McLean
    • Comet Pierce Pettis & Sally Barris
    • Ideas Are Like Stars Mary Chapin Carpenter
    • The Moon’s Song Anne Hills
    • The Galaxy Song Eric Idle & John Du Prez

Songs

• “Fireball” (YouTube video with music and spectacular images) by Earth Mama (Joyce Rouse) from her album Under the Rainbow. Our cosmic history in upbeat words and music. Rich rhythms, singalong chorus  create a great song telling the story of the Big Bang and the stellar evolution afterwards from whence we all come.  “Every element in me is stardust in the Galaxy/I come from a fireball.”  Read lyrics.
  
  

• “Here Comes the Sun” by George Harrison. Although the lyrics of this song seem to directly address the turning of the year at the Winter Solstice, according to Harrison the song was simply inspired by the long winters in England which Harrison thought went on forever. “It was just sunny and it was all just the release of that tension that had been building up on me,” Harrison said in a 1969 BBC Radio interview. “It was just a really nice sunny day, and I picked up the guitar… And the first thing that came out was that song. It just came.” Eric Clapton further explains the song’s origin: “talked about writing this song with Harrison: “It was one of those beautiful spring mornings. I think it was April, we were just walking around the garden with our guitars … we sat down at the bottom of the garden, looking out, and the sun was shining; it was a beautiful morning, and he began to sing the opening lines and I just watched this thing come to life.” 
  One of my favorite versions of this song is the one performed by Naya Rivera and Demi Lovato in the 2013 Glee  television episode “Tina in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  • • Harrison released a follow-up song called “Here Comes The Moon” on his self-titled 1979 album. That song is truly a tribute to the moon, the “sun’s little brother” that acts like a mirror in the sky, reflecting our light.

• Orbiting Jupiter  (YouTube)-  Words and Music by Cheryl Wheeler and Janis Ian. This is a beautiful song from hte point of view of an imaginary spaceship, which is enjoying the view of not only Jupiter, but looking longingly back at home on Planet Earth.  Cheryl said this was a “weird little space song I’d been fiddling with for years” but couldn’t finish. She played the first verse and “I Wanna See the World Through Other Eyes” bridge for Janis Ian, “and before I could even finish sighing that I just had nothing else, Janis sat down at the piano and came out with that beautiful “There’s Comfort in Starlight” chorus… Then we fiddled with a 2nd verse and got most of it. Soon after that, inspired by her beautiful chorus, I found a last line or two and there was my space song I’d always wanted to write.” Cheryl was later interviewed for the Planetary Radio Show, which is produced by the Planetary Society. Cheryl talks about her song Orbiting Jupiter, and the fact that it was taken into space.

  Read complete lyrics on Cheryl Wheeler website.

• Pointing at the Sun by Cheryl Wheeler, from her 2009 album of the same name, offers a point-counter-point to contradictory visions practiced by humans about the mysteries of the universe. She accepts the Great Mystery for just what it is, while at the same time singing that perhaps the plants and ants and elephants have a better idea about it all than we do. She begins by talking and appreciating the starry firmament: “So beautiful the mystery, we gaze aloft in wonder / At all the pieces we can see, at all the stars we’re under.” In subsequent lyrics, she clarifies that she cannot hope to fully understand these mysteries, but that is perfectly fine: “I don’t expect to understand, the question’s so beyond us / The mystery is majesty, humbling and wondrous.” Yet, in their hubris, by contrast, Wheeler says most of the world’s religions offer simplistic answers: “And here on earth we praise what God has done / Every church proclaims the only one.” By contrast, Wheeler willingly accepts that she doesn’t have a whisper of a clue of the great universal “Who and what and why and where and how and when.” She compares the misguided Believer of Absolute Certainty to fishes, rhetorically asking, “Do fishes ever look beyond the tank they’re in / And somehow contemplate creation too?” We are all in our own fish tank, with little hope of really understanding all the mysteries of the firmament. But while for humans, “every church proclaims the only one,” other species on Earth have found a better solution to how to live: “Ants and elephants have lives to run / And all the plants are pointing at the sun.” In her beautiful song, Wheeler suggests we could all do well to emulate the ants, the elephants, and the plants, by embracing our lives in simple ways under the warmth of the sun and the starry skies. – Excerpted from Pantheist Vision, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter 2023/2024.
  
  
• “Secret of Life” by James Taylor – Performed by Scott Grimes as the Season 3 Ending Song for the TV science-fiction series “The Orville.”  (YouTube) The lyrics by James Taylor incorporate a lesson from the physics of cosmology, specifically how the space-time continuum works:  “Now the thing about time is that time isn’t really real. / It’s just your point of view, how does it feel for you? / Einstein said he could never understand it all. / Planets spinning through space, the smile upon your face, welcome to the human race.”  This video version is notable in that, much like the Star Trek franchise, it depicts “people” from many different species – human and alien – all sharing the good times and the bad times together, with a series of flashbacks of scenes from the TV series, as all explore the mysteries of space together in peace.
  
  
• “Starlight, Star Bright” performed by Red Grammer  from  his Hello World! album.  This beautiful, heart-felt plea for peace was adapted from the “Starlight, Star bright” nursery rhyme by the late singer-songwriter, James Durst.  The song’s additional lyrics beyond the nursery rhyme envision all life on Earth living in harmony under the stars:
  
  “Shine on people of the earth
  Make us worthy of our birth
  Brighten paths through dark of night
  That we might walk in truth and light”
  
  “Shine on animals and plants
  Illuminate their lifelong dance
  Light the land, the sky and sea
  And all that share life’s mysteries.”
• Starlight” (YouTube) performed by Lucy Thomas – from the Musical “Rosie.” Words and Music by  Chris Broom. Although this song focuses on finding romantic love, the lyrics strongly relate how the majesty of the night sky and its starlight comfort and guides us: 
  
  Now twilight has faded, the air seems so clear
  How softly and gently the night sky appears ….
  I look to the heavens to comfort and guide me…
  Oh Starlight, shine bright
  Light up the sky tonight
  Inspire me from above
  
  
•  Keith Mesecher and the Cosmic All Stars – This group specializes in “cosmic love songs.” They offer participatory celebration and storytelling as ways of bringing home the majestic story of the evolution of the universe. The video clips feature beautiful photographs from the Hubble Telescope as well as Earth.  Songs featured include “Cosmic Blues,” “I Feel the Energy,” “We Are the Universe.”
  
  
• Symphony of Science: Remixes of classic science videos with original music using auto-tuning.  Includes such hits as “A Glorious Dawn,” with Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking; “Children of the Universe,” a tribute to one of the coolest objects mankind has ever produced – the Voyager spacecraft Golden Record, “Beyond the Horizon,” created to celebrate The Planetary Society’s 35th anniversary, featuring Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Emily Lakdawalla and Carl Sagan;  “Timelapse of the Entire Universe,” and many more.
  
  
• “The Play” by Peter Mayer.   This YouTube video features this song with stunning photography integrated with the lyrics in captions, which describe how to best view the night sky. You can view the lyrics and sound samples for this and other songs such as “Astronaut Dreams” and his famous “Blue Boat Home” on his website page for his album Earth Town Square.
•  “Silent Night” (for the cosmically inclined) by Connie Barlow. This YouTube video provides a simple instrumental version of the famous Christmas carol, with new lyrics that celebrate the scientific fact that we are made of stardust.
  
  
• “Solar System” by The Beach Boys (1977).
  
  
• “If I Were a Lowly Photon” by Terra Lumina. This YouTube video version of the song gives a good sense of the physics and “deep time” of the light of the universe, born in a stellar furnace in a faraway star.
  
  
• “The Best Way To Travel” by the Moody Blues, from their 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord. This YouTube video provides appropriate space-themed visuals to accompany the song that teaches us that “speeding through the universe, thinking is the best way to travel.”
  
  
• “Sun Rings: Music of the Spheres”  composed by Terry Riley, performed by the Kronos Quartet – Descriptive webcast by Planetary Radio – Incorporates sound recordings from space provided by planetary scientist Don Gurnett.
  
  
•  “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell, popularly performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. – Mitchell’s song tells us that “we are stardust” and billion-year-old carbon.  These lyrics capture the essence of insights that science can now confirm, although most of our carbon is actually much older than that, while some of it is only a few weeks or months old. While titularly about the famous music festival in 1969, the song can be understood as a celebration of Carl Sagan’s teaching us that we are indeed “made of star-stuff,” and also as a song advocating living in harmony with the Earth (“And we got to get ourselves back to the garden….” while simultaneously advocating for world peace, with the lyrics toward the end: “And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes / Riding shotgun in the sky, / Turning into butterflies / Above our nation.”
  • • Watch this video with Joni Mitchell’s explanation of writing the song, and performing it in her inimitable mesmerizing way for a studio audience  October 9, 1970 (with piano accompaniment!) here.  

• • • Interestingly, John Denver also wrote  a song about Woodstock, titled “I Wish I Could Have Been There” which expressed not only a desire to  have been there “When the people came from miles around to see / The children of the flowers come together … [and when ] the music makers first began to play / To hear them play,” but perhaps equally important, at the end of his song, “I wish I could have been there in the starlight  / When the countryside was quiet once again / And the music and the makers, the poets and the singers /  And the children of the flowers had all gone.”