The Story Of Ten Planets, Ten Songs
This month’s newsletter is a little different. Since early 2025, I’ve been at work composing and recording an astrological song-cycle. If you stream music, just enter “Ten Planets, Ten Songs” on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever you listen. It’s available on all the services.
Astrology sometimes gets a little top-heavy intellectually, and yet it’s as much about the seasons of the human heart as it is about insights and theories. My books speak to your head. Trying to keep that precious balance, here’s a song that I hope captures the feeling of each planet – something that’s aimed straight for the heart.
What follows is the story behind the project. Usually I accompany these newsletters with an audio recording. This month, we’ve added visuals to that audio as well.
Enjoy!
THE STORY OF “TEN PLANETS, TEN SONGS”
Lots of astrologers are musicians. For many reasons, that should come as no surprise. Just think of the famous “music of the spheres.” There are parallels between the structure of the solar system, musical scales, and the physical frequencies that underlie musical harmonies. We might make a case that every astrologer has the mind of a musician even if they can’t sing a note or play an instrument.
Astrology has been the focus of my professional life, but like many of my colleagues music has always been part of it too, seemingly a separate thing, but never really so. For most of my life since my teens, I’ve played in bands. It’s been a wonderful balance for the sometimes intellectually top-heavy practice of astrology, helping to keep me in touch with my feeling side, not to mention my physical body.
It’s hard to articulate this, but I believe that music has welled up inside of me from the same aquifers from which my understanding of the astrological symbols has arisen. I don’t think that I could be an astrologer without being a musician. At some proto-archetypal level, I don’t think they are separable at all.
Sixteen million years ago, dogs and cats parted ways on the evolutionary tree. I figure that if you dig about “eighteen million years” deep into the human psyche, you’ll find a place where astrology and music are joined together too.
TEN PLANETS, TEN SONGS
Over the past year and a half or so, these two rivers in my mind – astrology and music – have flowed into the same ocean. Ten Planets, Ten Songs is an album celebrating each one of the planets. I composed all of the songs and played most of the instruments. I was joined in the project by an extraordinary, creative soprano named Carrie Wright – her website is www.carriewrightmusic.com. On the Saturn tune, we were helped by Cynthia Wyatt – a Nashville studio harpist who’s been my pen pal for fifty years. She has played on tons of hits, including one of Faith Hill’s gold records. She played on Elvis’s last album. Glory of glories, she appeared years ago playing an orchestral harp in soft focus on one of Johnny Cash’s Christmas specials.
I recorded the whole project here at home on a Zoom R20. Apart from drum loops, the music is all truly “played” too – there’s no A.I. trickery or anything like that. I used a Juno synth, a Les Paul electric guitar, an Epiphone EB-3 bass, and Michelle’s sweet Taylor 110 acoustic guitar. Carrie and I sang into a Chinese knock-off of the world-famous (and expensive) Neumann U87 microphone. The tracks were mastered by Christian Wright at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London.
Here’s the story behind the project.
MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS
In December 2024, I flew to Chicago to offer an astrological seminar at the C.G. Jung Institute. In preparing my talks, I reread the Aniella Jaffe biography of Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I was struck by how often Dr. Jung advocated paying attention to little promptings from the unconscious mind – irrational whims that seem to rise up unexpectedly from nowhere for no obvious reason. On the flight to Chicago, I realized that one of those whims was tugging at me. Before I left North Carolina and moved west in 2008, I’d been kicking around the idea of creating a series of songs about the planets. Nothing much had come of it and meanwhile the chaos and distraction of moving and creating a new life in California had pretty much knocked the whole idea out of my head. But here it was, back again, whispering in my ear at 35,000 feet.
Divorce after a long marriage is a complex emotional and psychological process. At least half of the upheavals happen beyond the realm of your awareness, deep down in the unconscious mind. My marriage of nearly thirty years came to an end shortly after my wife and I arrived in the west. Back in North Carolina, my now suddenly ex-wife had written a trilogy of fantasy novels called The Rhymer and The Ravens. I’d composed two rock operas based on them which we had performed locally with our band Dragonship over a period of fifteen years or so. The point is that somehow when Jodie left me, music left me too. The two were bound together in ways I still don’t fully understand. Here in California, I still picked up my guitars from time to time, but I stopped writing songs. I even stopped singing. Being away from the musical community in Chapel Hill, NC, was a big factor too – there’s nothing like playing in a band to keep you engaged and your chops in shape. All of that came to an end for me out here in the Sonoran desert. Astrology became the total focus of my life. I wrote a lot of books, my school got off the ground – but dust gathered on my guitars.
On that flight to Chicago, I realized that for some transcendentally compelling reason, I needed to return to my “planets project.” That meant that I needed to start writing songs again. A piece of myself had split off and drifted away. It was time to invite it back. Astrologically, my progressed Sun was only one degree away from a conjunction with my Moon – it was time to heal something in myself. It was time to start paying closer attention to those Moon-prompts – time for me to “stop making sense,” as David Byrne put it.
I bought that little recording machine and re-configured my office into a mini recording studio. And I began composing.
ENTER CARRIE WRIGHT
The tiny little desert town where Michelle and I live lies about forty-five miles north of the Mexican border. We’re very isolated. The population is only about 3500 people, and maybe half of us are Mexican. It’s been good for my Spanish. I was walking out of the grocery store one day when I heard someone call my name. I turned around and it was Steve Stroud, a brilliant naturopath from Washington state for whom I’d once done a reading. He told me that he and his wife Carrie had just bought a house here, mostly to airbnb, but they’d be spending time in Borrego Springs too. They’d fallen in love with the place just as I had. I liked them both and the four of us gradually became good friends.
I’d heard that Carrie “could sing,” which can mean nearly anything. I knew that I liked her – she’s got a Scorpio Sun right on her Ascendant and our Moons are conjunct in Aries, so we share a large dollop of what “my old grandmother” used to call piss and vinegar. I knew we could get along in the pressure cooker of a shared creative project. Out of curiosity, I set up our composite chart. Artsy Venus stood conjunct Neptune less than one degree from the composite Ascendant in Scorpio. Meanwhile, our shared Aries Moon fell in the creative 5th house where it’s conjunct Jupiter. Astrologically, it looked like Carrie and I could play music together, or at least we’d have some fun trying.
Trusting those whimsical impulses from the unconscious once again, and without ever having heard Carrie sing a note, I invited her to join me in the recording project. It was a decision made solely on the basis of astrology and intuition, and obviously a perilous one. And it turned out to be one of the wisest moves of my life.
God sometimes blesses a singer with what musicians call “pipes.” In other words, the roulette wheel of genetics grants them the ability to produce pleasing, on-key, vocal tones. Sometimes all a singer has are those pipes. They’re still a blessing – that singer can bring joy to a lot of people by singing familiar songs in a familiar and very beautiful way. But sometimes God is apparently feeling more generous and real musicianship joins forces with those pipes. Think of Celine Dion or Nat King Cole. That’s when you get the kind of vocal magic that’s remembered for generations. Carrie has that blessing in spades. She’s creative. She thinks like a musician. She plays her beautiful voice the way Miles Davis played his trumpet.
The first day we tried recording together, she was hearing the music for the first time and she was naturally tentative. We did a lackluster track. I said let’s try another take, but this time sing it loosely, feel it more, experiment a bit, and don’t worry about hitting every note the way I wrote it. We can always delete the track. I’ll never forget the next few minutes. She said, “Should I try my 80’s rock chick?” I said yes, and Carrie peeled the paint off my walls.
All through the project, on every track, she added something unexpected and beautiful. Her pitch was perfect and her taste immaculate. We never clashed – and, ask any musician, that’s rare in a creative project! Our only consistent disagreement was in the mixes, where I usually wanted her vocal up higher and she’d vote for lower.
The tune about the Moon, called Spirit of the Water, has an outro that jams on the words, “show me the harbors in my heart.” Carrie triple-tracked her part on that one – singing in harmony with herself, in other words. I marveled at how great she sounded so often that out of curiosity I played it back without my voice or any of the instruments just to hear her on her own. With a bit of editing, her solo vocals became Invocation, the opening track of the album. I realized that each planet, if we engage with it well, can become a point of strength and resilience in us – “a harbor in our heart.” Carrie’s beautiful interpretation of that small part of one of my melodies set the tone for the whole song cycle.
The album ends with a second take on more-or-less the same piece, but this time my own triple-tracked voice and a new instrumental track support it. That version is called Benediction – and that’s why Ten Planets, Ten Songs actually has twelve tracks – Innovation, Benediction, plus one song for each of the planets most of us currently use.
THE SONGS
There’s no way to teach anyone everything about Jupiter in a four-minute song. In composing the lyrics for this project, right from the beginning I realized that I wanted to try to illuminate one single dimension of each planet. I worked hard on the lyrics – and you can read them all for free here if you want
The song of the Sun, You Are The Sun, is about how you have to be true to yourself no matter how much you love somebody else.
The song of the Moon, Spirit of the Water, goes way beyond feeling emotions – it’s a celebration of the part of us that “knows things” we can’t prove logically, such as love or the inherent meaningfulness of life. We’re all “riding a wind” that we don’t understand, but we can feel with confidence if only we open our hearts to it.
The song of Mercury, The Mercury Sign, celebrates the signs and omens that are always there guiding us, if only we look for them.
The song of Venus, Our Glistening Eyes, is about how true, lasting love strips us naked – perhaps a bit more naked than we want to be.
The song of Mars, Sweet Mars, is a celebration of believing in yourself and never letting fear stand between you and where you aim to go in life.
The song of Jupiter, Sunny Day, isn’t about good luck – it’s about resilience and faith when our luck runs thin. That’s the deeper heart of Jupiter.
The song of Saturn, How Well Did You Love, puts the spotlight on integrity and how in the end, it’s really all that matters in life.
The song of Uranus, Earthquake, shines a light on how sometimes there is nothing for it but to blow everything up and start over again. Sometimes we all have to just roll the dice a second time, or a third one.
In the song of Neptune, Ghost Ship, we set sail in the magic boat of consciousness itself as we ply the endless seas behind our closed eyes.
The song of Pluto, Die For It, is all about how the price of living is that we must face death – and how death teaches us so much about how to live while we are here.
WANT TO HEAR IT?
We can of course talk about music until we turn blue and that brings us no closer to actually hearing it. If you’d like to experience Ten Planets, Ten Songs, here’s how. Just go to any streaming service and enter either the album title or Steven Forrest and it will pop up. We’re currently working on making a physical version on CD available.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST VERSION OF THIS BLOG POST