The Cinematic Orchestra, "To Build a Home"

I love the calm expansiveness of this song. Patrick Watson sings of building a home to shelter his love, of stone walls and wood floors and windowsills, and ultimately of their transience; then he sings of climbing a tree in his garden to face the winds of the world. The music evokes space and stillness in the verses and a sense of gentle but insistent movement in the chorus, the piano a murmuring stream, like the passing of time or memory. It feels both intimate and grand, a song that embraces everything.

Maybe that's why, for a while, it seemed to be IN everything -- from movies and TV shows to figure skating performances. But my favorite use of it is in time-lapse videos by nature videographers on YouTube; I enjoy how they juxtapose the song's lyrics of domesticity with images of the wider, wilder world: birds on a river, clouds rolling off mountaintops, stars wheeling across the sky. This planet is home, too.

BONUS: "To Build a Home" also provides the background music for this video, popular a few years back, in which Neil deGrasse Tyson explains "the most astounding fact" that links our humanity to the cosmos:

And here's a version worth watching despite the low video quality: musician Daniel David Stewart performs the song with voice and piano while Deaf actor Joshua Castille performs it in American Sign Language. I love how Castille interprets not just the lyrics but the music itself, painting vivid pictures in the air even during the wordless stretches. The song comes alive not just in sound but in space, and I wish more music was regularly performed this way.

(Stewart and Castille were part of an amazing Broadway production of "Spring Awakening" that was a collaboration between Deaf and hearing actors, and I'll feature them in their own Song of the Day sometime soon.) Happy Thursday. ----- Listen to this and previous Songs of the Day here.