Landing In Heaven

Here is the link to the song.

I have a list of song titles which I keep reviewing and tweaking. “Landing In Heaven” has been on this list for a long time. And the song got a heartbeat on 19 September 2014 when the first lyrical draft was written.

The first verse at this time went something like this;

I woke up in Heaven, as my plane was touching down

And all I remember are those smiles and kisses

Tell me, how can I come back around

It didn’t really make sense with the “smiles and kisses” line and after a few tweaks I had the “no one was around” line.

But I had no music just a vocal melody.

On 25 September 2014, the main riff was written and recorded on acoustic guitar as a voice memo.

And the music just sat there as a voice memo.

Sometime after that, my son heard the voice memos and started playing the riffs, and it got me interested to work on the song again. He also started coming up with little derivative versions of the riffs and then he was playing the riffs on piano. He basically made the song available in the house. But I still didn’t have a proper arrangement.

And without a proper arrangement, I started working on it in the studio in December 2020 with an arrangement I called Draft 1.

Something like this;

Clean Tone Riff x4
Heartbeat Riff x2
Rock Riff x2
Heartbeat Riff x2
Then repeat the whole thing x2

In the space of six weeks, I did a few different arrangements.

The outro section was not part of the song at this point in time. That appeared a month later on the 19th January, 2020. And this is when the final arrangement was bedded down.

I sat with that arrangement for a bit while I was working on “I Would Love To Rock The World” and “Moon Of Forever” and kept adding layers of guitars to it.

And my son just kept playing derivative versions of the main riffs and he just kept on inspiring me to keep going and finish it.

Eventually, the plane landing was changed to a train slowing down because I had a song that I wrote in the early 90s called “Telling You Goodbye” that had a person catching a train to the city of lights in the sky. We catch trains every day to get from A to B so the train metaphor worked for me as a transition from one life to another.

I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies, so this is my take about a person who is in between two worlds as they have departed one world but do not know that they have departed this world.

And in this purgatory state, the person is offered a deal to come back to the world they just departed, but chose to wait in purgatory until they are reunited with their loved ones.

I woke up in Heaven as my train was slowing down

And all I remember, was that no one was around

And I’m feeling frightened as I’m told to wait here

Surrounded by strangers and the winds cold stare

That feeling of being lost and confused. Where are you, who are these strangers and where are my loved ones.

I woke up in Heaven as my train was slowing down

And all I remember was that no one was around

So I sit here waiting without you next to me

I see you crying but you can’t see me

And a stranger asks me, if I I’m willing to make a deal

Cause living without you is not living at all

Sometimes that deal is stacked against you. Nothing is free. A price will always need to be paid.