Deconstructing Year Four: For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

This song is all about Bones and how he, not Kirk, finally gets the girl.  At least for a little while.

The premise behind this episode is that the Enterprise finds a generation ship hurtling through space on a collision course for a federation planet, Daran V.  At first, they just think it’s an asteroid, but then they discover it’s a ship with a whole society contained within.  The thing is, nobody ON the ship realizes that’s where they are.  They just think they’re on some world called Yonada.  Bones has also been afflicted by a fatal disease, xenopolycythemia, which they figure out how to cure by the end of the episode.  Bones and NatiraBut before that, Bones, thinking he’s going to die soon, falls for Natira and gets married.  Once Kirk n’ friends figure out how to wrestle control of the ship from the computer and get the ship on course to a new world, they all leave, including Bones.  He’s duty bound to stay with the ship, but he hopes to see Natira again in the future.  I never saw that story, so who knows?

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There’s a conversation that happens between Bones and Natira when they are first falling in love, and that’s what the song centers around.  The song is from the perspective of Natira, and she’s basically trying to get bones to stay with her and live together happily.

When I first conceived of this song, I was playing around with Garage Band on my phone and trying to do something different than I had before.  I started with that constant kick drum beat, and from there, I intended to craft a sort of driving dance tune.  It had a more electronic sound in the beginning, but when we started to work on it in the practice room, it evolved, as most songs do, into what it is on the album.  For the World is Hollow LyricsI’m not really even sure what style it is anymore, but I like how it turned out.

This is the third song where we’ve used a variation on the same bridge.  Noah was the first to write a bridge about an all-knowing computer on Return of the Archons, and Mike followed that up with a similar section on My Directive is Prime on the Spock’s Brain album.  This song features the third such variation referencing a computer that has to be brought to its knees by the captain and his crew.  We had originally planned to do that for all of the crazy computer episodes, but we decided to not get too crazy.  I think this one makes it just about right.  Also, as featured on Archons, Noah’s wife, Holly, makes another appearance to sing backups for the bridge and choruses.

Fun fact, the old man from the beginning of the episode who gives the episode its name is the same actor who played Tamar in Return of the Archons.  He also played Theodore Haskins in The Cage and Menagerie Part I.

Five Year Mission
Year Four
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Written by Chris Spurgin

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