Song of the Day 2/1: Bruce Hornsby, “Circus on the Moon”

It doesn’t get a lot of coverage, but there’s an international space race going on. Target: the Moon. The most recent inductee to the League of Lunar Landers, Japan, joined the club in triumphant yet slapstick fashion last month. On the plus side, they managed to plunk their SLIM lander with unprecedented accuracy, just 55 meters from its target. Previous touchdowns were considered a success if they only missed by a few kilometers.

On the minus side, it landed upside-down, so its solar cells couldn’t generate any power. Luckily, 10 Earth days later, the lunar dawn brought sunlight at an angle the lander could access, and it managed to power up to send back some photographs of “rocks of interest.” The engineers named the biggest ones after various dog breeds – bulldog, shiba inu, St. Bernard and so on. This being Japan, they’ll probably have their own kawaii characters and trading cards by next week.

Bruce Hornsby’s song, released on 2004’s “Halcyon Days,” isn’t actually about the Moon. It was his response to America’s plague of school shootings, told from the perspective of a disaffected youth, something he didn’t reveal until he did a Reddit session a few years ago. It wasn’t released as a single, but it got a lot of airplay on AAA stations like WXPN.