Composition
Lyrically, Songs for Dustmites deals with "familiar themes of love and loss", while Burns himself has described the album as "songs about science and love". Musically, the album fits into the pop/rock and alternative rock genres, and is heavily influenced by the Flaming Lips. The lyrics of the opening track "Mighty Little Man" have been interpreted in different ways: a television watcher who suddenly turns into "an everyday superhero", or "a lonely inventor's eureka moment". It was inspired by inventor Thomas Edison and his "DIY projects that changed human history". When he made the song, he wanted it to "write a positive, empowering, exclamation point of a song". The song itself contains a "fury of noise". The following track, "What I Do on Saturday", is a "playful" pop song, while "Maintain" is a more mainstream song influenced by American alternative band They Might Be Giants. The song "Troposhere" is "bright and bouncy", sounding like the Flaming Lips song "Fight Test". The ballad "A Song for Dustmites" contains piano and synths. The next track, "Stick Around", is melancholic and sounds optimistic with its cello and trumpet. ">1" is a "simple" downtempo song that tells the story of a dysfunctional relationship. It features strings and a guitar solo.
Read more about this topic: Songs For Dustmites
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)