This is gonna be such a good album, you say. People’re gonna be so into this album. You can’t even realize it. This album’s gonna change everything. Every human life. Women and men. I give it maybe five years before, you know, the ideas really filter out to everywhere in the country, and we get the whole big problem of translating it. Maybe we oughta be thinking about that already. That’s maybe a big blind spot in our, uh, conception of this matter.
What’re we going to do to follow this up? Clyde asks. Shucking off his seatbelt, he squats like a hunchback on top of the bucket seat as best as he can under the convertible top. —It’s gotta be something better than this one.
Why does it always have to be better, Opal says. —Why does it always have to be more.
An album about space, see, Clyde says. —You’ve got sun and you’ve got moon already. Space is the only place left to go.
We already did Space-Girls, you say. —I don’t want to repeat ground.
But you won’t be repeating ground, because with this space album, you’ll be recording a track on the actual moon, Clyde says. —I’m joking, but I’m not. The government’s all into going there anyway, right? And I haven’t formally run numbers on this, but after a year or so of the album being out, we can probably massage the figures enough to justify booking the whole like extended band with round-trip tickets.
You drive, squinting; you are thinking about how the moon has low atmosphere, and what this will mean in terms of microphone pickups or instrumental tone. How do you tune a guitar to play in a low-gravity medium? You twist the problem around in your mind but can’t figure out whether the strings should be tighter or looser, so you open up the question to Clyde and Opal, discussion of which kills the next quarter hour.
I dunno, you finally say. —We can’t get too carried away with one idea. I’m thinking instead we go smaller. Like an album that’s entirely about a flower or a bug or a tree. But like, the perfect album about a bug, say. Like there’s a song about the thorax and a song about how the wings work, and like what it means to only live for an hour and to mostly need to eat during that time. Every fact included and musically correct. I feel like this is where the teen market is going.
Yeah but can you write a whole album about like bug parts, Clyde asks.
I can write an album about anything, you tell him. —It just has to be spiritual.
As macrocosm, microcosm, says Opal in a spooky voice. —Then she darts forward and unhitches half of the convertible top, causing air to suck in and Clyde to fall sideways toward it, bashing his head on the window.