This, That, and the Other

For Friday Faithfuls this week, Jim Adams has informed us that a rare, large planetary alignment of Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will be visible in the night sky with March 28, 2023, Then he’s asked us to respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing anything about outer space, or we can go with anything else that we thinks fits.

I’m going to respond to Jim’s post by flashing back and reposting something I posted back in August of 2021 that I think fits. I hope Jim doesn’t think this is cheating, but I admit this is a shortcut to responding to his Friday Faithfuls prompt. So are you ready?

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MLMM Music Challenge — Moonstruck

For this week’s Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Music Challenge, Jim Adams gave us The Grateful Dead’s “Standing on the Moon” as inspiration. The first song that came to mind was Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage,” which features the line, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” But I realized that I already featured that song in one of my Song Lyric Sunday responses last August.

And that’s when the old Frank Sinatra song, “Fly Me To the Moon” popped into my head.

“Fly Me To the Moon” was written by Bart Howard in 1954 as “In Other Words,” and it was introduced on the cabaret circuit by Felicia Saunders. Two years after Kaye Ballard recorded the first commercial version of the song, Johnny Mathis released his rendition as “Fly Me to the Moon.”

In 1962 the composer Joe Harnell revived the song, giving it a bossa nova arrangement. His version peaked at number 14 in and won a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Two years later, Frank Sinatra recorded the song with the Count Basie Orchestra arranged by Quincy Jones. Though it was never a hit, his is considered the definitive version.

Sinatra’s 1964 recording of “Fly Me to the Moon” became closely associated with NASA’s Apollo space program. A copy of the song was played on a Sony TC-50 portable cassette player on the Apollo 10 mission which orbited the Moon, and also on Apollo 11 before the first landing on the Moon.

Here are the lyrics to the song.

Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like on
Jupiter and Mars

In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby, kiss me

Fill my heart with song 
And let me sing forevermore
You are all I long for
All I worship and adore

In other words, please be true
In other words, I love you

Fill my heart with song 
Let me sing forevermore
You are all I long for
All I worship and adore

In other words, please be true
In other words
In other words
I love
You