Tuesday Bonus Song: We Gave Up The Stars For This

My favorite country song is The Highwayman.  Here’s my bid to catch some of the same magic.  Lyrics are below, also, added lyrics to Deceiver.

We Gave Up The Stars For This
By John Wilder

Daddy worked the line back in ’69
Watched Armstrong step on silver dust so fine
Said “Boy, one day we’ll all live up there”
Then the TV went dark and the porch light stared

Now the same old streets, same busted dreams
Old broken bottles where the rockets used to scream
We traded lunar boots for welfare lines
And the flag on the moon just faded to white

in silence

We gave up the stars for this
Traded infinity for a government kiss
Poverty’s still here, just wearing new clothes
While the Sea of Tranquility grows cold
Neil and Buzz, forgive us, we quit too soon
We gave up the stars… for this back-room saloon

They promised us the war on want would end
Sixty-five came, and trillions got spent
But the poor still knock on the same cracked door
And the projects look taller an they just hide it more

Meanwhile the shuttles rust down in the Cape
And the launchpad’s a ghost town full of red tape
Every billion we burned on the ground on earth
Could’ve built us a highway to our rebirth

We gave up the stars for this
A handful of dust and a politician’s bliss
Same old hunger, same old pain
While the moon hangs like a reminder in the midnight rain
God forgive the coward in our bones
We gave up the stars… and came back home

I still hear the static of Eagle’s call
“One small step” echoin’ down our halls
We were giants once, reachin’ past the blue
Now we’re beggars on the corner, wonderin’ what happened to us

We gave up the stars for this
A slow defeat and a coward’s wish
Armstrong’s bootprint’s still perfect and clean
While we rot in the shadow of what might’ve been

Lord, take us back or let us die tryin’
We gave up the stars… and I can’t stop cryin’

Outro (spoken over fading steel)
One small step for man…
One giant leap

Will we take it again?

18 thoughts on “Tuesday Bonus Song: We Gave Up The Stars For This”

  1. there is only one option really…excellent chance of victory but after action paradigm very questionable.

  2. What’s this ‘we’ shit, kemosabe? I sure as hell didn’t vote for Camp of the Saints over reaching for the stars.

  3. Clever & quite creative.

    John – – You are full of surprises…. and probably turkey !

  4. We could be exploring the universe, instead of slowly dying out on this small rock – Maximillian

  5. Let’s take back the jungles and forests and oceans and sky around Earth, first. And NOT “cuz climate change”!

  6. And it looks like Russia’s launching facility is toast, they may not fix it, and they too won’t be going back to the stars.

    1. They certainly don’t have the money to now. But, it was 1950s science running 1960s engineering, so there’s that.

    2. I don’t do Windows, but for my Linux machines, I use ffmpeg to capture the audio. The program is available for Win10 (no idea on Win11) and Mac as well. Check out https://ffmpeg-api.com/learn/ffmpeg/guide

      FWIW, it’s another one of those Swiss-Army Chainsaws, but I use it regularly to record web audio. Apparently it can convert types, like wav to mp3.

      FWIW, on Linux systems, there can be slight differences in how the computers are configured. I found it a good idea to have a prototype command for each computer. (One laptop is an oddball…)

      The recording process in Linux is a mild pain, but if I had the desire, I could write a script to simplify it. Still, muscle memory does the work.

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