This week it’s a cloudy cluster of related words as we play with lovely sounding space dust, a haziness or vagueness and more, but where can it be found song lyrics? They are all derived from the French nébuleux or Latin nebulosus and nebula meaning mist. Nebula of course is a very big word, because of how much there is out in space - interstellar clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases, some are light years wide. It’s so vast, and mind-boggingly it makes us feel nebulous as to how to even think of it. How might you depict a nebula? Well, a nebulist is an artists who avoids distinct lines or borders, while a nebbich is a person described as colourless or inconsequential. Suffering from nebulaphobia? Then you have a fear of fog. Does that make things any clearer?
Through all this mist, where might such words come up in lyrics? There are quite a few examples, but let’s just scatter a minimal amount of musical dust, giving more space to add your own below:
Bjork’s 2011 scientific concept album Biophilia delights in the macrocosm and microcosm in the the song Crystalline:
Underneath our feet
Crystals grow like plants (listen how they grow)
I'm blinded by the lights (listen how they glow)
In the core of the earth (listen how they grow)
Crystalline internal nebula (crystalline)
Rocks growing slow mo (crystalline)
I conquer claustrophobia (crystalline)
And demand the lights
Meanwhile the British German avant-garde group Slapp Happy from 1973’s Acnalbasac Noom, summon up this rather beautiful set of lines.
His silhouette rancid with diamonds
Splinters like a stone in the palm of your hand,
He's rigged with a nebula's sine qua non
A festival of bones on a table of sand.
And then more recently, there’s British Sea Power’s quest to regain something of our lost instincts in Want To Be Free from 2017’s Let The Dancers Inherit The Party:
I was thinking of another day
Thinking how I didn't see it coming
Ah the gander and the hunter and the gatherer
Feel like a traveller from another planet
This being carried upward into reason
Hey now
Now you say
It's gonna be OK
And the trees are green and overhanging
Featherlight
Free and everlasting
Hey now
Now you say
Don't get carried away
Now we're under the stars
Smoking cigars
On top of a motorcar
Hanging out
Like some kind of nebula
We want to be free
Want to be free
It will last forever
Eternally
Meanwhile Rita Ora’s nebula is a bit more intimate and sexy - coming from a spaceship, if you know what I mean. That results in Facemelt, from her 2012 Ora album:
I'm the kind of heat that will make the make the place melt
Got the Nebula
For your spaceship
Last time in it, in it, in it, make the place melt
Feeling like it's burning up, now you know how they felt
Nothing vague about that, but what about nebulous? Here’s an icon, Siousxie, with the song ICON, from her Banshees album of 1979, Join Hands, linking the stars, fame, and the general cloudiness of the music business, and band split, with apocalyptic imagery:
Those words hang like vicious spittle
Dribbling from that tongue
Close your eyes to your lies
Force feed more pious meat
Those nebulous codes and disciplines
Stick in that new born throat
Instil a lie, an artificial eye
To view a perfect land
Icons, feed the fires
Icons, falling from the spires
People are hard to understand, get hold of, and that’s where Joni Mitchell comes in with this wonderful description of a relationship in the tricky balance of Love or Money, with the funky L.A. Express from the 1974 album Miles of Aisles:
Vaguely she floats and lacelike
Blown in like a curtain on the night wind
She's nebulous and naked
He wonders where she's been
He grabs at the air because there's nothing there
Her evasiveness stings him now
With long legs, long lonely legs
Bruised from banging into things
Artists get lost all the time in a world of nebulousness, of nothingness, but few found themselves in creativity and use this state better than David Bowie, here with the epic, a myth-laden Width Of A Circle, from Man Who Sold The World in 1970:
He struck the ground a cavern appeared
And I smelt the burning pit of fear
We crashed a thousand yards below
I said do it again, do it again
(Turn around, go back)
His nebulous body swayed above
His tongue swollen with devil's love
The snake and I, a venom high
I said do it again, do it again
(Turn around, go back)
So then there are many more galaxies of nebulae, and nebulousness out there in lyrics and beyond. Feel free to share yours below, astrologically or otherwise.
Want to suggest other examples of this word in song lyrics, or other unusual words or contexts? Does this song make you think of something else? Then feel free to comment below, on the contact page, or on social media: Song Bar Twitter, Song Bar Facebook. Song Bar YouTube. Please subscribe, follow and share.
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