Happy Voyager Day!
Crissi Cochrane
Happy Voyager Day! On this day in 1977, the first of the two Voyager space probes was launched by NASA, containing the golden records of “The Sounds of Earth”.
Voyager, and a love story behind those golden records, inspired my 2014 song “And Still We Move”.
Ann Druyan served as the Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, and the committee, also chaired by Carl Sagan, was responsible for curating the selections on the Voyager Gold Records. Each disc, affixed to the two Voyager probes, contains greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, nature sounds, laughter, and music (and bearing illustrations depicting how to play the records). It also contains a one-hour recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan as she meditated on earth’s history, civilizations and the problems that they face, and what it was like to fall in love - the latter being something she felt keenly in that moment, as a romantic relationship was unfolding between her and Sagan.
Ann gave an interview to Radiolab about this story, and I found myself jotting down quotations in a notebook, which became the basis of the song “And Still We Move”. This has been one of my favourite songs in my career - I especially love the way the horns lift off at the end of the song - and I regard it as a kind of prototype for the custom love songs that I now write for listeners around the world. It was my first attempt at turning someone else’s true love story into a song.
It makes me feel deeply peaceful to think of the Voyager probes - now 19 and 21 billion kilometres from earth - carrying messages of love and humanity into the cosmos, so August 20 has become a special day to me, my unofficial celebration, “Voyager Day”.
