Train
Drops of Jupiter
2001 · Drops of Jupiter
Official music video. Official video on the Train channel. “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me).”
Documented
Single by Train, released 29 January 2001, from the album Drops of Jupiter. Columbia. The band is the credited songwriter. Pat Monahan is the singer.
What can be seen or heard
The lyric sends someone out past the atmosphere, through planets, and back. It asks what she learned, whether she missed the person left behind, and whether she will tell it. Moon, weather, and a return are in the picture. The official video on the Train channel shows the band with a string ensemble at Union Station in Los Angeles. Nigel Dick directed that video. An earlier video, with a banner reading TRAIN, also exists. This chair links the station film.
What the artist said
Monahan has said the song came after his mother’s death from cancer. On VH1’s Behind the Music he said the opening arrived in a dream about a year later, and that he took it as her account of moving among the planets. That is his account of the writing. It is not a later cosmology placed under his name.
Living Realm comparison
A person leaves, crosses the sky, and the song asks for the report. That shape sits beside other departure-and-return chairs on this shelf. The comparison does not convert his dream about his mother into a hidden history. His account stays the account.
Related
A link is a place to compare. It does not move this recording onto that record.