Bring the Light – Humanist Culture

The opening song for the Solstice may seem simple, but it had a lot riding on it. It had to introduce the themes of the event – light and darkness, humans and their relationship to nature, and community.

Now, the world is not exactly lacking songs about light and community. But there were some subtler criteria that we needed to satisfy.

Introduce singing to people, many of whom don’t think of themselves as singers
Launch people on an intellectual journey through history
Launch people on an emotional journey, from light to darkness to light again.

Teaching people to sing is a multi-step process. And one important part is for people to be comfortable singing loudly, confidently. Even if they aren’t very “good”. The point isn’t that we’re singing beautifully. The point is that we’re singing together. Plus, the only way to get better at singing is to actually do it.

So our intro song had to encourage people to sing loud, and had to be the sort of song that sounds good even when a bunch of people who aren’t very good at singing are getting the hang of it.

For the emotional arc, it needed to be high energy. But we also wanted the first “Light” section of the night to have a different feel from the second “Light” section. The first section needs to have undertones of “things are not actually okay – there’s a darkness up ahead.” The second Light section wanted an undertone of “we’ve just been through the darkness, and we came out stronger and more confident than we went into it.”

Intellectually, we wanted to establish that we’re traveling through history. The Solstice is about science and reason. But to showcase why those are important, we also need to highlight what came before.

Alex and I talked over these goals, and then Alex wrote the song “Bring the Light.” We settled on something reminiscent of a tribal chant, that explored the different mythologies surrounding the sun, ending with our current, scientific understanding of the sun.

(“You are a crucible, of pressure and heat” was a surprisingly hard line to write – we didn’t want to use science-y-jargon-words like “fusion”, because they felt out of place alongside the mythology, but we also didn’t want to be so poetic that people missed that we were speaking literally about the sun.)

The song is fun, but Alex’s introduction to it gives it an air of desperation that’ll get revisited throughout the night.

Getting Better, All The Time

Having said all that… in a celebration of reason, progress, and admitting when you’re wrong so that you can do better next time, we should note…. we made a couple mistakes with this song.

We didn’t give people space to breath before the “Bring the light and let it shine on me” line. Next year we’ll have a slight pause between the second line and the third.
Because people kept having to remember to sing “Bring the Light”, they didn’t get to pay attention to the other lyrics.

In the video above, Alex sings “Drive your chariot” and then everyone else sings “Bring the Light.” The interplay of the two lines is neat to listen to, but for the song to actually succeed at its role in the event, people shouldn’t struggle to listen and sing at the same time.

So next year, we’ll be having people simply repeat each line. Cleaner, and let’s people get a better sense of what the song is about.

Bring the light…
Bright the li-ight…
Oh bring the light and let it shine on me.

Bring the light (Bring the light)
Bring the li-ight (Bring the li-ight)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.

Drive your chariot (Drive your chariot)
Pull the flame (Pull the flame)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.

Eat the sky (Eat the sky)
Make it bleed (Make it bleed)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.

Speak the word (Speak the word)
Make it be (Make it be)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.

You are a crucible (You are a crucible)
Pressure and Heat (Pressure and heat)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.

Bring the light (Bring the light)
Bring the li-ight (Bring the li-ight)
….Oh, bring the light and let it shine on me.