"What are you listening to right now?" thread | Page 700 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

@sigh butterfly said

I always giggle a little when you mention Muse b-bug because of my first exposure to the band. In the early 2000s I was managing the biggest project of my career that required 100 data entry stations working 24/7 for 6 months. For the first few weeks things went fine with almost every person connected to some listening device and typing away. At some point my human resources person walked through the production area and decided that the headphones were a safety hazard. She talked the owner into banning them. Instead we had a radio/turntable attached to huge speakers for the operators to share. Most shifts agreed on the usual light rock stations except for one. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but somehow we ended up with half of the Sunday morning 3rd shift coming from a nearby Baptist Church. I believe they would all go to worship when their shift was over. The other half was made up of college students who could only work weekends. So I get a call from the supervisor around 4:00 AM Sunday morning telling me I have come in. Seems the church folks had listened to gospel music for 4 hours with all of them singing along and shouting things like “Amen” and “Praise Jesus”. So I guess as an offset (or revenge), when it was the students turn to pick the music one of them choose The Muse album Origin of Symmetry. To the Baptists, Muse sounded like the devil himself singing from Hell. They were really shook up and some just walked out and never came back (not even for their check). By Monday we had gone back to the headphones. So whenever I hear Muse mentioned, I find myself properly aMUSEd.

Oh my goodness SB that’s absolutely hilarious, especially because OoS is such a particularly dark and experimental album, and the closing track, “Megalomania”, has a funny story too.

So Matt Bellamy is atheist, and he wrote quite a few songs wrestling with his spiritual beliefs in the early oughts. That includes the closing track of OoS, “Megalomania”, which deals with something like the futility of creating humans to serve God when they are just going to sin anyway, and also with his feelings about the fact that his girlfriend at the time couldn’t have children (which meant a lot to him I guess). So basically it’s a whole angsty atheist existential crisis of a song, and the organ on the track was recorded on an old church organ in England (St Marys Church in Bath, according to musewiki.org). And the vicar wanted to see the lyrics for the song that he was lending his church organ to, to make sure the band weren’t devil worshippers, so Matt wrote some completely different happy-go-lucky lyrics to show the poor vicar to get his approval so he could use the organ

I do kind of feel bad for the Baptist folks and the St Marys Church vicar, and I certainly don’t advocate deceiving people to get the use of their instruments on your music that they wouldn’t approve of if they knew the truth, and I think Matt himself understands that he wasn’t in a good place then… but it’s still funny and it’s a great song from a great album, which has meant a lot to me at various points

I think the only album that would’ve been more on the nose to play would be Absolution, since that one is even more concerned with Matt’s spiritual issues and opens with “Apocalypse Please”, begging for “something Biblical to pull us through” but I’m not sure when your story takes place, it may not have been released yet (Absolution came out in late 2003/early 2004 in the US).

I don’t know, maybe it was being raised on George Harrison , but I adore songs where the writer grapples with spiritual questions, regardless of what they actually believe in