Today’s Writing Song returns with song 11, Phasors on Stun by FM, which may please the sci-fi and Trekkie crowd.

I didn’t hear this song until 1982, although it apparently came out in 1979. I was introduced to it in FM Club (no association with the name of the artist) by my physics partner in the last year of high school, which was then grade 13 in Ontario. The FM Club had a loft above the school cafeteria and played music over the speakers during lunch time. The club members got to choose the music and brought in their own records (yes, records, as in LPs for long play, or 33rmp vinyl discs, which were 12 inches in diameter). The FM Club members also hung out there between final exams.

To this day, the songs on this album remind me of space, sci-fi, physics exams (and all the formulas and numbers I knew by heart), and electric guitar, which my physics partner played. He even taught me a song he wrote. More organized than I was, he would play his guitar around 6:00 p.m. the night before a final exam and relax while I still frantically crammed, writing out many “study note” pages of equations, formulas, and constants to be looked over one last time before entering the exam room. Such data were not given to us at the top of the page in those days! We actually had to memorize them.

FM is now available on iTunes, but only as of recently (2016?). I had searched YouTube and iTunes for years to find Phasors on Stun and waited about 24 years to hear it again! But that’s the beauty of being older: time warps and circles close. Time ceases to be linear, in a way, and you can move forward and backward among your experiences.

So what does Phasors on Stun have to do with writing? It’s a good creating song for action scenes, especially anything to do with running, flying, escaping. The scenes don’t necessarily have to be sci-fi. I’ve used it for present-day, realistic fiction.

PHASORS ON STUN – FM, from the Black Noise Album

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