Tomorrow’s World
These days have been a test of emotional endurance for everyone, these are times when most people feel trapped and there is no way out, but we also have to make a stand and look towards a better tomorrow, and while we are in lockdown, we need to find ways to feel free, rather than feel covered in darkness.
One musician has a message of hope and peace for us all, Matt Bellamy, Muse’s frontman, released a single called “Tomorrow’s World” and in it, he sings to us about making the most of every second in our lives in order to live a better future.
Interview With Rolling Stone
What inspired you to write your new song “Tomorrow’s World,” and how did you record it?
I recorded in a little studio near my home. I wrote the chords for it a little while ago, but I never had a lyric for it. To me, it was more like a soundtrack composition for a soundtrack that didn’t exist. Then I started playing around on the piano in lockdown and these words just came out. It just seemed to be quite fitting for how I feel at the moment.
It’s wanting to feel this sort of optimism for what this could be. What are the positive sides of this? The positive sides are that I’ve managed to have a lot more time with my family, a lot more time with my son, a lot more time with my wife-to-be and the baby-to-be.
And I have just more time to enjoy the simple things in life. I know it hasn’t been like that for everybody, but for me that has been an eye-opening experience. I look back at the last 20 years of my life and I’m thinking that I’ve been on the go with recording, touring, traveling. Even when we weren’t touring or making an album, I used to always find an excuse to fly back to London for a few days or fly here and there or whatever. I was all over the place.
This has forced me to really look at what it feels like to live at a slower pace and enjoy home life and enjoy real quality time with kids. I’m all over schooling now. I know exactly what my son is learning and what is going on with him. All that stuff really feels like an eye-opening experience to me, and I think that song reflects that.
Towards the end of the song, I veer into the idea that the world itself is something that maybe we should be a bit more … that we should reduce the pace, slow things down a little.
All of this is said in a song that was made for this moment, as many other songs sometimes the lyrics just come out, as if the music is the bridge between the feelings and the words that express them.
To me, this song tries to capture what it feels like to be hit with that if you haven’t felt that way for a long time. We don’t need much. All of us as individuals, and I think the whole planet itself could really benefit from that mentality. There are lots of tragedies and lots of terrible things happening out there, but there is something happening which we could learn from.
Matt Bellamy has been known to write about very big things like the apocalypse, war, and loss of humanity, but at the same time he is also known to write about love, hope and peace. This is worth noting as current events inspired him to make something hopeful in a very natural way instead of forcing it, or just writing something a bit darker. There is a simple magic to the song that does make the listener feel hopeful for the future.
This sort of balance of good and bad is felt throughout the song as it begins with darker chords that slowly transition into brighter happier ones, it makes for a great soundtrack of our time as we look forward to a different world.
