Endors has today released "Under Cerulean Skies", a double A-side single of two cover songs ("Enduring Thoughts" and "Fleeting Thoughts"), in aid of the Alzheimer Society of Ireland .
All royalties of the single from both download and streaming services will be donated to the Alzheimer Society of Ireland — a charity that helps those affected by dementia, their families and their communities.
"Under Cerulean Skies" is available to download/stream on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube.
Composed by Yasunori Mitsuda (best known as the composer of the soundtracks to the Chrono series), these two songs originally featured on the 1999 soundtrack to Chrono Cross — a story with a major focus on time, memory, identity and death.
Having experienced first-hand the effects of dementia on a loved one (and the echoes of it on the rest of us), Yasunori's songs travelled with me on several long nights of despair, frustration and anger throughout 2020 and 2021 — feelings which were only exacerbated by the times and the inability to be there at the side of the one I loved.
Now, on the other side of that bastarding disease and the phantoms it trailed in its wake, "Enduring Thoughts" and "Fleeting Thoughts" are two songs that stand out in Yasunori's canon as having had helped me deal with (and, to a point, overcome) the trauma of it all.
As I recorded them, the two songs became spiritual companions, but at the same time served as counterpoints to one another. Though both were unified by their theme of memory, their focus was separate — "Enduring Thoughts" was about the presence of memory; "Fleeting Thoughts" was about the absence of it.
"Enduring Thoughts" features a distant, reverberant metronome, deliberately reminiscent of a clock's tick — a reminder that memories and the people experiencing them are still rooted deep within the flow of time. "Fleeting Thoughts", however, features none — it is the former's shadow, serving as an unfortunate reminder that those whose own memories are fleeting (or lost altogether) are, in a sense, already removed from time and ultimately themselves.
Yet, even then, we ran like the wind,
whilst our laughter echoed
under cerulean skies
For Eileen Spurling (née Guilfoyle; 21 May 1929 – 3 November 2021)