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Our first real performance as "BEYOND the STARS" was on the Big Island in February of 2023. Since then, the island has been a touchstone for us, though only thanks to the grace of the many people who make it possible for us to be there. During our stay this past winter, Christina wrote a song that expresses the gratitude and affection we feel for the place and its people.
There's a deep symbolic resonance between Hawaii and the band name we chose for entirely other reasons. I won't go into it here, other than to make the general point that touring as a band is something like being couch surfers. Short of fame, the whole enterprise depends upon the grace of other people who aren't far removed from strangers.
Every time we land on the island I am struck by a sudden sense of terror at the state of dependence we have just put ourselves in. My hope is that this song makes plain the thanks we feel to all those people who have made it possible for us to stay for a little while in paradise.
Check out our single featuring the lovely folks of Juniper Djinn. Recorded live in the Mule Mountains above Bisbee, AZ.
Our 2024 debut album... ONE PLANET
What is BEYOND the STARS?
In this case, it’s a musical duo composed of Author TM Shaw and Christina Forever. Since their debut performance on the Big Island of Hawaii in February of 2023, BEYOND the STARS has followed the edge of inspiration, and a significant portion of I-80, across the US, in search of momentary glimpses of human community and a welcoming place to park.
Having grown up in different times and different places, Tim and Christina found communion with one another in the depths of a conversation that began late one evening in a hallway of a hotel in the City of Angels. It is a conversation that continues to this day. Their sound, born of radical differences and deep kinship, developing through vocal harmony and the interplay of two guitars,or the pairing of guitar and electric piano, is uniquely their own. It is familiar, yet not reducible to any particular genre or era.
In the right situation, live shows unfold long narrative arcs, spontaneously discovered in-between the songs. In such moments of shared discovery we might arrive, for a moment, BEYOND the STARS.
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It struck me when discussing this song with some friends that we tend to unconsciously conflate the future with eternity. When this future becomes the past, we are left with a strange and poignant disconnect. I don’t quite have the words to describe it. The moment passes from future to past and the eternity eludes our grasp.
This conflation and its aftermath can be seen particularly clearly in the progress of technology. Technology that once seemed nearly magical comes in time to seem almost laughably crude.
For me this well-known transition has had a particular emotional force, because my Dad worked for IBM for as long as I knew him, fixing mainframe computers out of their office in Providence, RI. He participated in the future, and then, just before the technological revolutions that made that future ubiquitous, he died. In dying, he passed into the past. Soon after, he was joined by the technology he had spent his adult life repairing.
In the years following his death he returned to me often in dreams. The first time was in the week after he died. It was simple and direct: he had returned home to clean out the clothes from his dresser. As years went by, my dreaming mind had to stretch further to explain why I hadn’t seen him for so long. Once he had another family in Australia. Once he had been in prison. During one visit he explained that he spent his time in the afterlife around a card table with three friends, playing UNO. It was a sort of post-mortem therapy. I asked him then if he would be reborn and he replied, “Not yet.”
I tell you all this as a way of introducing this video I made for a song I wrote following one such paternal dream visitation, which occurred back around 2016, when I was staying in the guest house of Dr John Haines. I woke up that morning and wrote the dream into a single verse that made me laugh. It seemed like a novelty song fragment, but I realized in the afternoon that it was more than that.
DIAL UP
TM SHAW: words & music, vocal, guitars, piano
CHRISTINA FOREVER: guitar, backing vocal
DAVID JACOBS-STRAIN: bass, mixing
Author TM Shaw is also at work on a series of groundbreaking essays
