2025-Jan-18 - Surfing The Jetstream
This week's randomly selected song Surfing The Jetstream is track #1 from disc #2 of my triple CD album It Was All Just a Dream.
Surfing The Jetstream first appeared on my 2017 album Juxtaposition, and again on my 2022 album Juxtaposition Reimagined. This song started out with the working title Ice Cream For Breakfast, and believe it or not, the two titles are related! The song started out with the simple descending riff that you hear in the opening of the song (and it is also the riff that accompanies the chorus of the song).
At first, I really couldn't figure out where to go with this idea. It was an uncharacteristically upbeat idea, so I felt like the idea should represent something that made me happy. Well, at the time I happened to be working a lot at the summit of Maunakea, and one of the benefits of doing so is our crew got fed breakfast every morning on our way up. We happened to have a self-serve freezer full of ice cream, so I would often make myself a bowl of ice cream for breakfast. Healthy? Absolutely not. Happy? Totally! 🤣
So as the ideas for the song began to develop, two things happened that caused me to change the title of the song. First, I added a drum beat to the song that brought me back to 1960s surf rock instrumentals. This set the stage for the second thing which was an incident at the end of one of the days I spent working up on the mountain top.
At nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, the summits of Maunakea and Mauna Loa are very dynamic environments that can go from serene calm to hurricane force winds in a very short amount of time. I happened to be working up there one of those days when the winds picked up, and we were forced to evacuate. Our fleet of 4x4 trucks are typically parked a mere 20-30 feet away from the main door of the observatory entrance. But with the wind howling away at 70+ mph, it was a real challenge to get from the door to the truck without getting blown over. It reminded me of trying to balance on a surfboard.
The reason these furious winds can come on so strong and so quickly is that because the summits of these two volcanic mountains reach so high in elevation, on occasion, the mountain tops get grazed by the North Pacific Jet Stream, a very powerful high-speed, high altitude wind channel that stretches across the Pacific.
So put these pieces together, and I felt like I was surfing the jet stream. And thus the song went from a story about my breakfast habits at the base of the mountain to my need to evacuate from the summit of the mountain due to hurricane force winds.
The melody from the original 2017 version of Surfing The Jetstream was played very straight and without any embellishment. For this final version of Surfing The Jetstream, I included the melodic flourishes and accents that I would typically add when performing the song. I used three guitars for Surfing The Jetstream. For the rhythm guitar parts, I played two different guitars. The first was my "Purple Phaze" Charvel Pro-Mod DK24 through the blue channel of my Synergy Bogner Ecstacy preamp. And the second was my Solar Guitars S2.6 through the blue channel of my Synergy ENGL Powerball preamp. I played all of the lead melody parts on my Blue Floral Ibanez JEM 77P through the red channel of my Synergy Soldano SLO preamp.
If you love what you hear and want to support the music I make, please consider purchasing It Was All Just a Dream on CD or digital download. I will gladly personalize and autograph your copy.
https://chrisstark.com/it-was-all-just-a-dream
Keep an eye out for next Saturday's song spotlight, and as always, thank you sincerely for all of your support!
Love, Aloha, and Rock!
❤️😎🎸