With the Sky
With the Sky was written in 2011, just after I checked out as a pilot. It’s had various tweaks and changes to the lyrics since then, but essentially the tune has remained the same.
I wrote it as a nod to the ballooning community, especially for those people who gave up their time for free and helped me to train to be a pilot. the majority of these belong to the British Balloon and Airship Club (BBAC), and for people in the UK, if you want to get involved with ballooning, then that’s a good place to start in terms of finding people near to you who will help you take part.
It’s very much a “pay-it-forward” community, in that it’s best to find a balloon team, help out with being part of the chase-crew, whilst you decide whether ballooning as a sport is really for you. Claire and I got involved in ballooning in 2001, and we were crew members for a number of teams until late 2007, when Claire ‘checked out’ as a pilot, and then we bought our first balloon, enabling me to train afterwards.
Essentially then, it took me nearly 4 years to train as a pilot. Partly due to the fact that I was sharing balloon time with Claire, who was still a novice pilot herself.
What I hoped to convey in the song, was life as a balloonist (or is it a “loonist?”). The fact we’re always watching the sky, looking at weather forecasts, checking out the wind speed, looking toward the tops of the trees even, in the sheer hope that the winds will be calm enough for us to fly. A lot of the time, especially when we lived in the UK (and we were up North as well….), those hopes were often dashed by turbulence, fog, and, more often, rain.
I don’t think that there’s been another song written about ballooning as such since Fifth Dimension’s “Up, Up and Away” in the 1960s. So, it’s really a modern slant on ballooning, from a pilot’s perspective. There’s no doubt in my mind, and I’ve seen significant changes in the weather since 2001, that the weather patterns are worsening. There are far less calm flyable winds since we began ballooning in the. early noughties. Some of our ballooning colleagues who’ve been flying since the 60s, 70s and 80s have said that those weather changes are even more significant since they began flying even.
So the “Give me another window in the weather” line in the song is a plea for just the chance to fly, which is becoming more and more the balloonist’s anthem, I think.
With the Sky was released on March 8th.
It’s on Spotify:
You can find the video here: