Lady Maisery’s “Order and Chaos” – a Scientific Folk Song About Death

Hazel Askew, of the folk-group Lady Maisery, on their song Order and Chaos:

We have many traditional songs with religious perspectives on death or magical, folkloric perspectives on death, so I wondered if it would be possible to write a song with a scientific, physics perspective on death? Could this be a branch of the folk tradition? To me, the beauty of science and physics sometimes doesn’t feel that far away from religious or folkloric beliefs about death. In many ways, these are all just frameworks that help us understand things we can’t immediately explain within the world and our lives, and I think folk songs are often records of the ways that we have tried to understand and deal with our lives over time.

So Order & Chaos was written as an attempt to convey some of the beauty of physics in a folk song, and to voice a reassuring, atheist perspective on death.

More here.

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