About John's Music
Investigate the songs and stories behind each of the tracks on John Snell's The Alien Highway.
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Kosovo
Area 51
Sodderville
Creative Abstractities
I love this song because my spell check hates it so. I wrote this song at age twenty in my dorm room in San Bernardino, CA. The tune was so familiar I was sure I was ripping it off from somewhere. It turns out it is not a total rip off, it's just really catchy. During the days while writing the song, the melody was so strong that I could not get it out of my head. It got to the point of freaky, so to safe guard future listeners against this fate, I wrote the song so it would flow into a different song at the very end: "So late at night when you're in bed and can't rid this song from inside of your head, think of the artist who once said…" This way if the song gets stuck in your head, you just need to follow the song to its end and you will escape from its entrapping melody. When performed live, a different song is attached to the end every time. View the Lyrics
Sail on Future
In 1996 I lived in a second level apartment overlooking 15 lanes of traffic and a gorgeous view of downtown Minneapolis. I wrote Sail on Future while sitting on a window ledge in my living room watching the evening's hustle and bustle in front of the big city. I felt at a loss about where I fit in this jumbled mess. I felt as though I had been swooped into the future and shown this scene of rush for shock value. The world has become so complicated. We must undergo 15 years of schooling just to survive in today's society. "I'm lost in the shadows of past generations who built up our world too high…" "I'm sure I was aimed but I'm lost in this world that was made." Take a look around you. Everything you see has been made. View the Lyrics
In Human Scale
This song was written while philosophizing in the bathtub. Consider the huge range of size between planets just in our solar system. Consider the recent discovery of planets outside our solar system that are hundreds of times larger than Jupiter. Keep in mind Jupiter is 80 times the diameter of our planet earth. My Hypothesis follows: A planet's life forms are proportional to the gravitational forces of the planet. Larger planets have stronger gravitational pulls, so a being from a planet with a gravitational force stronger than earth's (for example) would likely have to be larger and stronger than earth's life forms to survive under these conditions. In short--I believe that a life form coming from a planet many times the size of earth could easily be much larger than the life forms found on our planet (giving you a big being, if you will). We would be "globalcentric" (if I may invent such a term) to assume that all beings in the universe are of the same scale as humans. With this in mind, picture the earth in the distant future. Humans will likely be extinct (given current population growth [exponential and doubling in increasingly shorter periods of time] and the carrying capacity of our planet, humans will begin to encounter world-wide food and water shortages in 2015, cite book here. Not to mention the ease at which any deadly contagious disease could spread worldwide given the frequency at which humans are moved about the planet. No species has been able to ride this planet forever, etc…). Many of the structures and devises constructed by humans will still remain long after humans are gone. Imagine the wealth of information available about our existence that will be left waiting to be discovered. All of this information, all of our structures and devises, however, are in human scale. Imaging the frustration of a huge being trying to get information from a civilization the (relative) size of an anthill or of a child's small playset. There would be no way to enter our buildings, no way to drive our cars, no way to read our books or to play our movies or music, no way to easily derive anything about our existence from our remains. This is the main premise of In Human Scale-our own demise and a frustrated big being's discovery. View the Lyrics
Kayaking Down the Peshtigo
In 1988, a tradition of summer outings started with a nice, quiet fishing trip to Canada. Following endeavors took my Dad, the men and sons from both neighboring houses and me on many exciting water adventures. We went kayaking, rafting, and "funyaking" on the Bruel and Flambeau rivers in Wisconsin, sailing on Lake Superior, and canoeing in the boundary waters. A trip kayaking down the Bruel in 1993 prompted the writing of the 1994 "hit" song (as in I liked it a lot) Kayak!. In 1998 my Dad, my lifelong friend Nick, his Dad, and I went kayaking down the Peshtigo River in eastern Wisconsin. Come hear the tale. . .View the Lyrics
Queen of the May
In 1940 something, my Mom was crowned Queen of the May Day festival in the small town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. My mom got her fifteen minutes when she was only nine. The song's cadence is representative of a lumbering elephant, and the lyrics are as colorful as the 1940s event. The recording features the Twin Cities renowned drummer Rob Thomson (Twin Citians remember him from The Billies). View the Lyrics
Kosovo
This song was written and recorded during the "conflict" with or "strike" on Kosovo (summer 1999). The government's marketing of the war to the American public leaves me shaking my head in disbelief. In order for the public to fairly assess a situation, it is important they understand the full severity of what is going on. Calling the war a "bombing campaign" is done only to soften the brutal reality for public consumption. When one hears the word "campaign", pictures of streamers, party hats, and expensive horderves come to mind. Softening the severity of the war leaves commuters daydreaming about the weather rather than contemplating the morality of bombing the hell out of Kosovo relentlessly for days and nights on end. (During the two years before the war, 2000 Serbs and Albanians had been killed in the civil war in Kosovo. In the three weeks of bombing, more than 2000 people were killed. So, NATO had to kill 2000 people to stop the Serbs from killing 2000 people in the next two years. It's a lot like, "We had to burn the village to save it." [Pulse Weekly. March 1, 2000.]) My frustration with the publics' casualness towards the Kosovo "conflict" is one of the many things that inspired me to write this song. The lyrics to this song were revised hundreds of times-changing with each bit of testimony I read while researching the war on the Internet. I hope you find the recording powerful and full of insight. It is important people take the United States' involvement in foreign matters seriously and continue to evaluate such instances long after they drop from the headlines. View the Lyrics or Listen to the Song
All the Muse
This song was written for me in my head while I was dreaming. I was living with two kitties in my dream. Whoever owned the house we lived in didn't want the cats to go on the furniture or to go into certain rooms, so kitty-proof black lines were painted on the floor. As happens in dreams, things got all jumbled around and rooms moved to different places. My room was suddenly on the far side of one of these lines. I was the only one who gave these poor kitties any attention, and suddenly "the cats were kept from the boy who played." That's me. I cannot explain how incredibly emotional this dream was. The cats and I were so sad. My mother was playing the guitar and singing in the next room this song to comfort me. I woke up and jotted the song down before it escaped me. Strait from the muse is this song. The recording features the beautiful singer Lori Sinclair, the beautiful violinist Bethany Lacktorin, and the handsome classical guitarist Ryan Smith. I wanted to have as little to do with the recording as possible (since I had little to do with the actual writing) so I simply recorded and produced the song, and played only a subtle acoustic guitar in the background. View the Lyrics
Area 51 (and the Alien Highway)
(The album takes a philosophical jump to light speed starting here.) On a road trip to Madison one Easter weekend back in '95, my brother-in-law filled my ears with tales of the unknown and super-natural. He told me of an area in New Mexico where the military stored remains of whatever evidence was gathered from (what is now known as) 'the Roswell incident'. "Many unexplainable things happen down there," He spoke. "There are reports of diamond-shaped crafts hovering and flying silently in the air." I had never heard any of this kind of stuff before and was very interested. I wrote some lyrics in the days following and--not remembering the details--titled the developing song Area 52. Soon, however, Area 51 worked its way into pop culture, and as I watched movies and observed video games about Area 51, I realized two things: One-- the name of the joint in New Mexico is Area 51, not 52; And secondly, the dumb place had become so popular that Area 51 began to represent things as lame as pinball games and children's candy. I needed to come up with a different not-so-cliché-ish title. I renamed the song The Alien Highway, but had called it Area 51 for so many years that I still refer to the song as such. Thus: Area 51 AND the Alien Highway. Two names-- One very trippy song. The album cover for The Alien Highway is a depiction of Area 51's second verse. View the Lyrics or Listen to the song
The Intellectual Babbler Marco
I was visiting my-friend-since-the-age-of-five near Madison, Wisconsin when I got the inspiration for this song. On the last night of my visit, my friend and I went out with his brother Marco to play darts and the Jukebox. Marco is full of information. He spent the night filling me in on interesting events from the past. At one point during a forty-five minute spiel, Marco stopped and apologized for babbling not stop. He explained that he has a tendency to talk and talk, but as a consolation, noted that "at least I babble coherently. And I'm not just rambling on about nothing. What I say is at least intellectual." "The Intellectual Babbler Marco," I recited several times quietly. The following day on the five-hour drive to St. Paul by myself in my 1969 VW Karman Ghia, I started to write this song with help from my pocket recorder. The last verse was completed quite a few months later. I like the flow of the lyrics in this song, and I think they cater well to flowing across the sky in The Alien Highway album artwork. This song and Area 51 are my favorite recordings I have ever produced on a portable four-track recorder.