How old is drops of jupiter

It seems like you're preoccupied with that line where sweetness could tip over into treacle. You're consciously trying to stay on the right side of that. Yeah, exactly. It's almost, like, not supposed to happen. You're not supposed to do that. It's against the rules to be that honest, to bare your soul like that.

I guess if that's an issue, then I don't know what is. She was a steel magnolia. I got a lot of her strength along the way. A military family, right? Marine corps, all those travels we had growing up were a strengthening kind of thing. We became really tight-knit as a family because we were always moving. Early touring experience, actually! She was the mom and my dad because our dad was off fighting wars. It's a total tribute to that strength of her character and her nurturing, strong, amazing … She was an amazing woman.

When I sometimes dream of her, I feel like I got to see her again and I get to talk to her again. It's a zero-gravity space, and that's what the song is all about. Yeah, sure. I took a lot of them too. She taught how to edit film and stuff, with the little editing machine. We used to make films in our family. So, I used a lot of that footage in the actual video for the song and she appears in the video for the song.

When I dreamt of her last, it was just her wonderful face. Her spirit. I felt like I had a conversation with her and the words were not even clear. It was just being together and the aspect of her spirit being there.

My collaborator, Sue Ennis, who's worked with us for years and years for Heart songs, had a song for her mom called "Follow Me. We both kind of have a mom thing. We've talked about our parents and we grew up together, so we had all those connective tissue things in our hearts about our moms. So, we kind of collaborated on the ultimate mom song to try to reach into the ether and touch base with that.

We morphed two songs into one. It's a hybrid mom song [laughs]. Well, luckily enough, a few years ago, we got to go to New York, when we used to be able to go anywhere, and we got to see "Springsteen on Broadway" live. When I saw that show, it completely blew my mind. It changed my world around because I've always loved Springsteen and his amazing writing. Growing up with Springsteen on the radio, for instance, he'd be sort of behind this big wall of sound with this rock and roll accent where you could hardly understand the lyrics.

Then, seeing him live, completely by himself, stripped-down, those songs and those lyrics —it completely altered my perception of Bruce Springsteen.

He's an insanely great writer. Those words are so depth-y. Later, after having seen that, I watched it a million times on the show you can watch on television. Then he did Western Stars , his other album that got me through the whole last Heart tour. It was life-saving stuff for me. So then, when I started to do this album, I was like, "I should do this because of the pandemic. I didn't say hi that night, but I do know him. His people told our people that he really liked my version of 'The Rising'!

That made my day—my whole year, actually—to know that he thought it was cool. Sue had actually started that song with Ben Smith, the drummer. My Seattle folks. They had this song that is, like, a "friend who's going to be there for you" kind of song. The support system that you've always dreamed of having. That's what the song talks about.

I've always been that person where I'm there for my people, you know? I show up. It's a really simple way of saying that you're going to be there for somebody that needs you. And that's a big deal! I mean, that's a huge thing to be able to do for anyone. Can you describe a recent situation in which you were able to be that for somebody?

If you are that person for your other people, it's not an easy role to play to show up for somebody that needs help. A lot of people don't have that skill, you know? A lot of people are not equipped with the emotional wherewithal to be there for anybody else but themselves. So, that's what that song is all about. I had actually recorded it earlier before I got into doing the album. I'd done that in Austin with an amazing producer, David Rice, for a film, actually, which was made in South Africa.

It's a true story about human trafficking in South Africa. This guy, Simon Swart, who made the film—it's about to come out, actually—he wanted to see if there was a song I could do for the film. And so I decided that "Daughter" would be a really cool idea, because there's a lyric in the song that says, "She holds the hand that holds her down. The movie's called I Am All Girls and it's about to come out.

Anyway, that's the backstory on that thing. I've been singing that song all my life, basically. It's a really amazing song.

Somebody told me that the chorus part—the "Lie-la-lie"—was initially a placeholder, but he kept it in the song like that because the verses are so wordy. It sort of opens up and he kept it that way from the initial demo of it. I got Sammy Hagar to sing with me on that because he's a buddy. He's a rock god. He's funny as hell and he's a really good guy.

I said, "Why don't you do something with me on my album here? I want to bring in some people that I love! What have you got? It's elsewhere now. Anyway, long story short, he said, "Nah, that's too predictable. I don't want to be so predictable, to be the Red Rocker on a song about rock. I used to be a boxer! There's only one of him in the world.

That's him. And then the Cranberries cover ["Dreams"]—me and Jeff, my hubby, were just driving around in Sonoma County. We heard it on the radio and he said, "You've got to get Liv Warfield to sing this with you!

I said, "OK! Let's just do that! I think that can be done easily enough! I kind of heard myself saying something one night. I was like, "Wow, we've lost another angel of rock and roll.

It's kind of like, "Well, they're going to be having some big party up there at the angel ballroom. I went and sang some stuff for Taylor for his last album, called Get the Money. Really good album. I said, "Well, I'm going to make a solo album now, so do you have any cool jams laying around, dude? I've got some cool jams kicking around, dude! He sent me this jam that they had. It was a completely long-winded jam that needed a lot of structuring.

I structured it very differently from the original. And I had these words, so I put it together and it just became a fun sort of lark of a song. It's kind of a dark topic, but [you can] make it kind of a funny moment.

Sort of like the song "The Inbetween. I have two twin boys that are both 21 now. One boy, Curtis, wrote this poem for a class assignment—a poetry-writing assignment, I guess. I thought it was really clever.

He was like, "Black and white, wrong and right. Now, after this horrendous political era we just tried to live through with all the bully-pulpit stuff we've had to deal with, I was scrolling through my notes and I found that again. I thought, "This is really relevant for our times that we're living through politically. It kind of sheds new light on a situation.

Sounds like Curtis is pretty wise and perceptive. What do you learn from your boys? You learn everything from your kids. Being a parent is not an easy thing to do. It's one of the bigger challenges you could ever face.

Because when you love somebody that much and you're trying to help them survive through their own childhood. Because you care. Because you love somebody even more than your own life, your own self. It's bigger than you are and you're responsible for it. The best thing you could ever possibly try to do is keep them alive long enough to figure it out for themselves.

That's a story about a toxic relationship that you have to get out of. You have to face the truth of how you've enabled yourself to be hurt and you've enabled the relationship to go bad.

It's kind of self-examination of "OK, I have to be brave enough to get this out of my life and take responsibility for what my part in it was.

It's kind of complex, but it's definitely a truth that we've all had to face at some point in our own relationship lives. There are some unhealthy things sometimes that leave behind. Were you thinking of any particular relationship or was it a composite of relationships throughout your life? There's been more than one! So, it's a conglomerate of various situations I've found myself in that I had to get out of and get over.

After the '80s, we went home to Seattle. That was a time when all the Seattle bands were exploding. I thought, "Oh, no!

They're going to hate us because we're '80s dinosaurs! At the time, our friends from Alice in Chains … Layne Staley was still walking around and talking. But he was definitely on a course that everyone could see. It was going to go badly. He was going to self-destruct. We all saw that coming. He was a sweet soul, you know? It was hard to see that inevitable demise. He was letting himself go down that dark ladder. So, that's when I wrote that song. He was still alive, but everyone could see that.

That's what that song was about. It's sort of a cautionary tale, but it's also a very heavy message because I don't think he had a chance against that dragon. It was just a sad story in advance of the sadder story. That's been around for a long time.

It never was destined to be a Heart song, although we tried to do that song a few times, in a few ways. That was a nice version of it. That's cool you knew Layne. I personally declare Dirt to be the most powerful album ever written about addiction. Oh, for sure. I love that band. Mike Inez was actually in Heart for a while after Layne disappeared.

He was our bass player for five years, I think. Michael Inez is one of the funniest humans on the planet, for Christ's sake. A seriously funny person. Maybe the funniest person I've ever met in my life. That's kind of a take-off on Paul Simon. I cut my teeth on Paul Simon's stuff when I was nine, 10, 11 and Early on in my playing life, as an acoustic guitar player.

I'm actually glad I didn't get sued by Paul Simon because that basic guitar part in the song was a cue in Jerry Maguire , which was based on a Paul Simon-type fingerstyle part. I kind of took that and ran with it and put lyrics to it, because I already had written it. I had already put that part together for the movie. If there's anyone to plagiarize besides Paul Simon, I suppose I could plagiarize myself [laughs]. That's the first thing I wrote for this album and I was just trying to touch base with my earlier self—my college-girl self with the poetry that I used to explore before I was in Heart.

He's definitely in the top three, in my estimation. Maybe the Beatles. Those are the four pillars of greatness, I think, in music. I wanted a tribute to Eddie [Van Halen]. When he passed away, I was really sad, of course. I was very moved to try to pay tribute to him in some way.

When we used to be in the same place together in the '80s—we did some shows with those guys—he told me he thought I was a really great guitar player on the acoustic. I was like, "How can you say that? You're the best guitar player on the planet! Why don't you play more acoustic yourself? The next morning, at the crack of dawn, he called my hotel room and played me this amazing instrumental on the acoustic I gave him.

It was just one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. Just an exciting, inspirational moment, although he'd probably been up all night partying. So I thought I would return the favor and make him a piece of instrumental music on the acoustic guitar. That's what I did. I put a little piece of the song "Jump" in there. I tried to approximate what I vaguely remembered from what he played me that morning.

I know things have been kind of hot and cold with your main project over the last few years. How would you describe your personal and creative relationship with Ann today? Well, that's a loaded question. I think we're fine. We both kind of welcomed the break from each other and from Heart in a certain way. I think there's a certain blessing inside the larger curse of the whole shutdown we've been living through. Personally, I feel like it's been a relief and a chance to reorganize who I am, thinking of who I am inside the larger picture of Heart and who I am outside of Heart altogether.

There's a lesson in this shutdown for me, and part of it is to remember who I am without defining myself as somebody in Heart. Which is a beautiful reckoning, I think. There's an offer for Heart to go out in I think that would be awesome to do that.

I would want to do that. But having been outside of the world of it and the pressure of it and the framework of it for this long now has been very freeing. I feel I've gained a lot of momentum as a person because of it.

When Rise Against's Tim McIlrath talks to his fans and teenage daughters, a troubling throughline emerges: how difficult it is to achieve the American Dream. After hearing those repeated concerns, he decided enough was enough. So on their latest album, Nowhere Generation , which was released June 4, Rise Against takes a stand against these demoralizing, capitalistic forces. When we would talk to our fans, the theme was apparent.

These ideas kept coming up. This idea of these anxieties about what tomorrow's going to look like, and also the weight they felt they were waking up with every day.

The more I examined that, the more I realized that there's a lot of evidence and a lot of good reasons to feel that weight. Whether it's living in a time that has normalized the idea that one can work full-time and still live below the poverty level or living in a time where we're expected to accept the idea of concentrated wealth and the rise of the one percent. Living in a time where we're dealing with global warming and climate change, and society's response or lack of response to it.

A number of other elements have contributed to this downwardly mobile landscape. How did these conversations help you be more honest and authentic as a songwriter? I think that having a relationship with our audience helps that. I think being a father of two teenagers gives me a bit of a crash course in it as well—and then just talking to the band about it. It's amazing how many people have their own stories—their own things to add to this narrative.

It takes on a life of its own. People talk about what it's like to feel like they're swimming upstream as they try to get ahead. They started asking questions like, "Why? Why does it feel like this?

What's happening? I grew up in a relatively stable time politically, economically and socially, and I think we took a lot of that for granted. That's what made [succeeding] generations less sympathetic to these concerns.

I think that we all think, 'Well, this is life. It's hard, and you figure it out,' without acknowledging 'Is life different? Is the experience different now than it was before? Are we living in a society that is ripping the crops out without replanting the seeds for the future? That's what's happening now. I think that we're starting to realize the new and unique obstacles to getting ahead in today's world.

Young people are less likely to own a home or have savings. That is keeping people from being able to pursue that American Dream. Yeah, that's one of my favorite songs. I think you're right. I think people feel a little bit lost. And "Nowhere Generation" is speaking to people who are trying to figure out where they fit in the landscape nowadays, if they fit in at all.

And I talked about young people, but you don't need to be young to relate to this idea. For people my age, older than me, if you were part of this generation that is sort of falling victim to the short-term way of thinking instead of long-term, then you're part of the Nowhere Generation. On the song "The Numbers," and elsewhere on the album, you remind the listener that they're not alone in this fight.

Why do you think that's important, especially entering into this post-pandemic world? I think it's pointing out things like, despite its flaws, democracy is still our most effective way of governing. Giving voice to the people is still the best way we've figured out for human society to function.

But it definitely requires those voices. It requires that voice. I think that not only that voice, but social movements throughout history have given rise to a lot of the ideas and concepts that we take for granted today.

There's a lot of evidence of individuals or groups that have put their hand on the steering wheel of history. And it shows them for the better. And that progress is often the result of somebody simply being fed up and trying to demand that they be listened to.

We still have a government that's based on voting. It's people that need to be listened to. That song opens with a sample from "The Internationale. And how can history be part of the solution?

Especially with a song like "The Numbers," it was talking about the people. It has been used by many different countries and [adapted into] most popular languages. I thought it was a good way to show the listener just how timeless some of these concepts really are. It turned into a great way to start the song and to start the album.

It sets a good tone. One of the last ones I got to was "Broken Dreams, Inc. I'd sit there for a while until one day I started writing that chorus and then the rest of it just fell out of me.

But it took me a long time to get around to. I was almost going to give up on the song. Then, it all came together as one of the best songs on the album. Was it important to have a universal look and feel? We wanted this era of Rise Against to be defined by a look that people would recognize. If you were to look back at it, you would see the imagery around development. You would know specifically that this was this era of Rise Against. And part of the way of doing that was working with a single person instead of many different people, which is what we've done in the past: Someone for the album, someone for the video, someone for the live look, someone for the merchandise and that.

I recently read the story of a Chicago fan who was so inspired by the band's music that he became a lawyer. What does it mean to see that tangible impact?

Seeing things like that is the best part of being in this band because you write these songs hoping that they land with people. Not everybody connects with it.

It's just not the way it always turns out. When somebody does, it really takes this song that you pull out of thin air—you just made up—and turns it into something real and tangible. It validates the effort that you put in. It helps that person, but it also helps you as the writer of it to know, "Alright, there was a reason that put these words out to the world.

They found somebody and they helped shape their path. No, it was just a very quick and random interaction at a coffee shop. We ate there, we just ran into each other on the street. But the story stuck with me. The band's debut album turned 20 this year. What does that milestone mean to you? It really puts a fine point on just how long we've been doing this.

I don't think that the guys that made that record had any idea of what was ahead of them. That we would be touching the lives of people that were being born that year, or the years after that. That's something that I never thought we'd be playing shows for the babies that were born the same year the debut album came out.

That's a good question. All rights reserved. Two thousand years ago, Jupiter was king of the gods -- and twenty years ago, few radio anthems seemed as divinely inspired as Train 's "Drops of Jupiter Tell Me ," which was released on March 27, Loss is a frequent muse for artists, but when singer-songwriter Pat Monahan went to bed one night and woke up just minutes later with a vivid lyric inspired by the recent death of his mother from cancer, he achieved something rare: A song about loss that soars instead of mourns, leaving the listener with a life-affirming sense of joy and serenity.

Grounding the song's celestial side are the oft-quoted lines from the bridge about "deep-fried chicken" and "the best soy latte you ever had," detailed lyrics that lend a sense of everyday levity to the spiritually uplifting anthem. Even though I was thirty years old, it felt like I was five," Monahan tells Billboard about penning the lead single to the group's second album, Drops of Jupiter.

You can do anything you want, swim through the planets It was a way of easing my mind that it wasn't a bad thing. Train had already gone top 20 on the Billboard Hot in with "Meet Virginia" from their self-titled debut, but "Jupiter" catapulted the San Francisco rock band into the stratosphere.

On the 20th anniversary of the album's release which is being commemorated by a bronze edition vinyl and 20th anniversary edition album at DSPs with six bonus tracks , Billboard spoke with Train frontman Pat Monahan for a candid deep dive on the oneiric origins of "Drops of Jupiter," a shelved music video for the song and the surprising pushback he faced from people who thought the rock staple's lyrics weren't "masculine enough.

Let me start with what I think of as the beginning. I've seen interviews where you say the line "now that she's back in the atmosphere" came to you in a dream, inspired by the loss of your mother to cancer.

Yep, that would be right. It was a longer process than that just because during our first tour with "Meet Virginia," my mom got sick. She didn't live long after I was told she was diagnosed with cancer. I was off the road when she finally passed away, it was close to Thanksgiving, and it was terrible, obviously, for all the reasons that it would be. Then we started to record a record soon after that for the Drops of Jupiter album, and "Drops of Jupiter" was not on it.

We had finished the album and, basically, we waited months because the record company didn't think we had the first single. As we waited, we were writing songs, and the songs were not thought of as special. The pressure was pretty high. At the time, Don Ienner was the boss over at Columbia Records, and we had a rule in the band where we didn't write outside the band. So Donnie called a meeting where I was supposed to go to New York so he could basically tell me it was time to start writing with some professional songwriters.

Couple days before that meeting, I fell asleep and dreamt the entire song -- and recorded it the next day, just a little demo of it. I flew to New York to have that meeting [with that song] in my pocket.

I said, "I don't expect that you're gonna like this song, but this is what I dreamt. Dream songs, man, that's where it's at. Song of the year! He said, "We need to get Paul Buckmaster to do the string arrangement" -- because Almost Famous was a very popular movie at the time, and it was bringing all these old feelings back about these great string arrangements from Elton [John] and all that.

So we hired Paul Buckmaster. And because Brendan O'Brien, the producer of the album, was at the time a native Georgian, he was friends or at least acquaintances with [pianist] Chuck Leavell, also a native Georgian. He came and played and gave the song all that bounce that you hear. He's a very percussive piano player who did a tremendous job. I want to back up a bit — when you said you fell asleep and woke up, what are we talking about, a daytime nap? What was the setting?

I was in Erie, Pennsylvania, where I'm from. I had moved my family back there because my relationship with my wife at the time was terrible and we needed to figure out if it was a location thing -- and it was not -- but we were there, and I fell asleep at night, and woke up maybe ten minutes later and it was all there. I went downstairs and wrote it all out.

I wanted to ask about a few specific lyrics. For starters, why Jupiter? Could it have been Neptune, Saturn? The soy latte lyric is such a specific detail. Was that inspired by a particular memory? There were a couple of things. At the time I didn't even drink coffee, but everybody else in the band did, and they would get soy lattes. It just sounded like a cool drink that I never had. And then I was asked to not put that in there because it was not, I don't know, it didn't sound masculine enough or something.

And I was like, "I don't understand that. Is that why "tell me" is in parenthesis on the original release, as "Drops of Jupiter Tell Me "? That's exactly right. That was Donnie's idea just because he's like, "Look, when people go in the record stores, they say, 'What's that song, "tell me" something? It was called "Drops of Jupiter" and no one ever calls it "Tell Me. And honestly, whatever he thought was gonna make it work, I supported, because we needed him to be supportive of it.

I don't know. That's what I thought at the time, too. So when I was singing it and people were asking me to change lyrics, I said, "Well, why don't you tell me what lyric to sing and I'll try it. When you guys come up with something better, I'll sing that. Was that a specific reference to something? I think that's the nature of human beings, that's the kind of best friend you want to have. At the time I had a really good best friend, and that's probably the way we felt about each other all through our childhood.

So Don Ienner was a fan of the song right away. What was the band's initial reaction? I think they were relieved the song that we needed was written. But if they were being honest, they didn't want those lyrics in there either.

There's a great deal of self-preservation that happens when there is a chance of success. People want to protect what's theirs. In an interview with American Songwriter in honor of the songs 20th anniversary , Monahan revealed the real story behind this unforgettable song.

Every day, we would rehearse and we would talk about our goals and everything. And all that we wanted was to get a record deal. Because it was like, well, what are we doing? Once this group of people passes on you, it seems like everybody in the business will do the same. So we changed our goal, and the goal became we just wanted to make an album, a real one. Curtis Mathewson was a friend of our bass player who basically recorded it for free. Selling a million albums was still no slouch.

On the second record, Donnie got way more involved. He wanted to call a meeting with me. The next day, I demoed it.

The third day was my trip to New York, and I had this little disc in my pocket. He Donnie was playing me all these songs and, basically, he was walking me through this is what you have to do to get this next album right. These are the special ones. Fucking song of the year. It was the whole shift, because what he was, was passionate.