7 Heavy Metal Songs About Space Travel
6. Blaze Bayley - Stare At The Sun
In the progression of Blaze Bayley’s first outing following his ousting from Iron Maiden, Stare at the Sun is the yang to the yin that is The Launch, the preceding song. The Launch is short, feverish and hopeful, emphasizing the excitement of a launch into space and embracing the opportunity to explore the stars.
Stare at the Sun is the flipside; slower and more somber with a touch of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, not insofar as the musical stylings but in the lyrical content: reverence of one’s ethereal surroundings and, grimly, an acceptance of a fate where one drifts in space forever.
What is strange about this song is that there is no given reason as to why this is so, as Bayley mourns “as I live, so I die here in endless night” and “this is my cradle and my grave,” but there is no purpose given as to the failure of this expedition, especially if this song is a continuation of the previous track.
Some of the final lines liken this song to that of the previously mentioned Black Sabbath song, where “the end of the world has come” for Earth, described earlier as a “world of madness” but the song is otherwise vague enough to allow the audience to make their own assumptions.