Last month was the first anniversary of Felix Baumgartner’s free fall from the stratosphere! Remember this fearless guy who jumped from space and reached a speed of 1,357.6 km/h or 843.6 mph, becoming the first human breaking the speed of sound, and at the same time breaking tons of records… what a fall! Not only he has the good looks of a hero in a Hollywood movie, but he even had a large smile as soon as he was on the ground! I would have certainly died at the first second.
Now, ‘Mission to the Edge of Space: The Inside Story of Red Bull Stratos’, a documentary that follows Baumgartner and his crew during the five years before the big jump, has been released to commemorate the event, and with Red Bull for sponsor, you can expect videos showing multiple angles during the free fall as well as all the data to impress the tech-obsessed of you (altitude, speed, G-forces… ). Curiously, the documentary is free to watch on the music streaming service Rdio, all you have to do is to sign up for a trial with the service… but what does such a documentary have to do with a streaming service like Rdio? The music, the soundtrack of course! They had promised access to ‘music that inspired Felix to break the sound barrier’ and today Rdio sent me this link to listen to a Portugal the Man’s song, ‘Oh Boy’, an exclusivity for the movie. The song has actually been on YouTube for a month but I had never heard about it, and it is even used for the trailer of the film!
It’s a great song, piano-driven, slowly soaring and sooo Beatles-que, or so Lennon-esque I should say. It’s so easy to love Portugal the Man and their ability to write songs like this, they speak to your inner Hey-Jude-moment, to your sweet ear for poignant melodies just perfect for grandiose moments like this historic giant free fall.
‘Did you feel so small? / You’re never lonely / Cause you’re never truly on your own’ sings John Gourley with his dreamy falsetto,… space,… music… classics like Bowie’s Space oddity will certainly also come to mind and yeah, there’s that sort of feeling in the song too, all wide screen and uplifting. So ‘set yourself free’, watch and listen: