The Second Law of Thermodynamics

There are so many ways to make chaos
 It’s the direction things naturally flow
 It grinds mighty mountains to sand hills
 It gives all the stars their bright glow
 It’s the ultimate end of all empires
 The bane of both pauper and king
 Always driving us forward
 A perpetual emotion machine
 
 Entropy!
 Things will fall apart
 It’s plain to see
 Life will break your heart
 Record your misery
 Plot it in a chart
 Flip it upside down
 And turn it into art.
 
 There are so many ways to be broken
 It seems foolish to try to stay whole
 You can spend all your time fighting fires
 That still wind up out of control
 Better by far to be mindful
 Of the karma your actions will bring
 Causality rippling through spacetime
 The universe hears itself sing

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Production Notes:

The last song written during the initial sessions in summer of 2017. By this point it had become clear I was writing concept album about breakup and depression and I felt like it needed a song to tie the theme together. A sort of mission statement. My perverse sense of humor found it entertaining to do this in the form of a bubbly Beatlesque pop song. From this idea came backbeat guitar, the “ooh-bop” chorus vocals and Andy Griffith whistles. The addition of synths, particularly the main hook pushes it a bit from the Beatles towards latter-day U2 and Coldplay, but so be it.

The lyrics derived from a longish social media post where I talked about the stochastic nature of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. (I’d been teaching a senior level Thermo course at the time) Essentially entropy increases because the number of ways to be disordered is vastly larger than the number of ways to be ordered. The fact that we often view the second law as “things fall apart” has to do with the fact that we humans tend to prefer the rare ordered low entropy states to the more common random ones. The zen student in me decided this sounded like the Buddha’s second noble truth; that the origin of suffering is in the clinging to preference.

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Equipment: