Interpret:

Nightwish

Album:

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

I. Four Point Six


Archean horizon
The first sunrise
On a pristine Gaea
Opus perfectum
Somewhere there, us sleeping


After sleeping through 
A hundred million centuries
We have finally opened our eyes 
On a sumptuous planet
Sparkling with color, bountiful with life
Within decades we must close our eyes again
Isn’t it a noble
An enlightened way of spending our brief time
In the sun, to work 
At understanding the universe
And how we have come to wake up in it?


II. Life


The cosmic law of gravity
Pulled the newborns around a fire
A careless, cold infinity 
In every vast direction
Lonely farer in the goldilocks zone
She has a tale to tell
From the stellar nursery into a carbon feast
Enter LUCA


The tapestry of chemistry
There's a writing in the garden
Leading us to the mother of all


We are one
We are a universe
Forbears of what will be
Scions of the devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For The Greatest Show on Earth


Ion channels welcoming the outside world
To the stuff of stars
Bedding the tree of a biological holy
Enter life


The tapestry of chemistry
There’s a writing in the garden
Leading us to the mother of all


We are one
We are a universe
Forbears of what will be
Scions of the devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For The Greatest Show on Earth


We are here to care for the garden
The wonder of birth
Of every form most beautiful
Every form most beautiful


We are one
We are a universe
Forbears of what will be
Scions of the devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth


III. The Toolmaker


After a billion years
The show is still here
Not a single one of your father died young
The handy travelers
Out of Africa
Little Lucy of the Afar


Gave birth to fantasy
To idolatry
To self-destructive weaponry
Enter the God of gaps
Deep within the past
Atavistic dread of the hunted


Enter ionia, the cradle of thought
The architecture of understanding
The human lust to feel so exceptional
To rule the Earth


Hunger for shiny rocks
For giant mushroom clouds
The will to do just 
As you’d be done by
Enter history, the grand finale
Enter ratkind


Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day’ll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library


Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day’ll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library


Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day’ll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library


We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!


IV. The Understanding


We are going to die
And that makes us the lucky ones
Most people are never going to die because
They are never going to be born
The potential people who could have been
Here in my place but 
Who will in fact never see
The light of day outnumber 
The sand grains of Sahara
Certainly those unborn ghosts include
Greater poets than Keats
Scientists greater than Newton


We know this because 
The set of possible people
Allowed by our DNA so massively 
Exceeds the set of actual people. 
In the teeth of those stupefying
Odds it is you and I
In our ordinariness, that are here
We privileged few
Who won the lottery of birth against all odds
How dare we whine at 
Our inevitable return to that prior
State from which the vast majority 
Have never stirred?


V. Sea-Worn Driftwood


There is grandeur in this view of life
With its several powers, having been
Originally breathed into a few forms 
Or into one
And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on
According to the fixed law of gravity
From so simple
A beginning endless forms most beautiful
And most wonderful have been
And are being, evolved