For the past year or so I've been thinking a lot about what it is to be human and how odd it is that our souls reside in an animal. Our bodies are so frail and take so long to heal when we're injured. We have instincts that are necessary for our survival as a species but which cause us unbelievable amounts of trouble. I read somewhere that our brains are the most sophisticated and complex "computers" in existence and that if we were to build a conventional computer that would equal its processing power, it would be the size of a football stadium. That made me think that perhaps a soul requires a certain level of sophistication in order to exist in this physical world. Up until now, our brains were the only home they could find. But I thought that maybe, in the future when we are able to create computers that would equal or exceed our brain's processing power, perhaps a soul would be able to "colonize" them as well. Thus, maybe, one day, our souls could exist in something other than an animal.
This series of thoughts led me to write a song called Robot. In it, I imagined a "race" of poet robots who were free of our most debilitating instincts and character defects. These robots would wander the earth in search of material for their poems. They would be able to do amazing things that would be impossible for a human. They could surf a tidal wave, dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meditate for months on end in a tree in the Amazon rain forest. They could stare deep into the night sky and wonder, as we do, from whence they came and where they will end up when their time here is over.
Stay tuned for the song. It will be with us shortly. Zemfira played some beautiful guitar and sang some lovely background vocals. Vera from the Russian band AloeVera wrote and sang one of the verses and Brady Lynch played some soulful bass. At the moment the song is in the capable hands of Roman Urazov in his new studio, DGray in St. Petersburg. We're beginning our ROBOT TOUR in Turkey and Moscow and will continue it to the 4 corners of the Earth in 2015.
-David