(Credit: CBC)
Astronaut and International Space Station (ISS) commander Chris Hadfield, stationed on the ISS, and Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies have recorded the first duet performed simultaneously from Earth and space.
The pair have been friends for a long time, and started collaborating on the song while Hadfield was still in training.
Robertson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, on which the song premiered on 7 February:
I wrote the first verse and chorus, sent it to him, and asked for some technical jargon for the second verse because the first verse was emotional. I asked him to be on the lookout for speeds and weights and a number of revolutions, serial numbers; anything we can use to put some technical data into this song. After about a day and a half he sent me the second verse, and it was poetic and good. I was just like, "Dude, you are a high-functioning individual. You are in Russia training to command the ISS, and in your free time you wrote the second verse of this song."
The song, called "ISS (Is Somebody Singing)" celebrates the wonder and magnitude of space — and just how isolating it is up there. These themes have been explored many times before, perhaps most famously by David Bowie and Elton John (our favourite might be this one by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets) — but never from space and Earth at the same time.
You can watch the song in the video below, and find the lyrics here.
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