The idea for the album began with two things. To begin with, I saw our first recorded image of another planetary system, and it gave me a sense of awe that I hadn’t felt in a while. Planets orbiting a star, 300 light years away. In addition to that, I wanted to do something I had never done before, which is write a concept album. Beyond the stigma of what that can be, I wanted to give it layers and real personal meaning.
On the surface, the story of EXOPLANETS is that through our own sense of wonder and discovery, we create a probe to send to our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri. We also give the probe a mind, in order to ensure completion of the mission. But as the probe becomes more and more lost, its mind begins to wander…
That could be it, but my intention is to use this idea as a reminder to ourselves. And that is, as we travel through life with all its challenges and hardships, there is always time to dream and to find beauty in what surrounds us. That is the human experience, I wanted to use this weird story of distant travel seen by an artificial, flawed creation, to remind us of that.
Speaking of stories, it was always my hope to compile an immersive package, with text and diagrams. When I wrote the short story about the probe for the insert, I took the sections that are from its point of view and fed them into chatbots to rewrite them. So, instead of imagining the internal dialogue of an artificial mind, here in the future we can just find out what that is. I took my text and used the chatbots as a writing/editing plugin for those paragraphs.
In the end, I wanted to compose an eclectic album that spoke to certain ideas about being human, and looked at them through the lens of something that is not. Perhaps there is more common ground than we think…
Andy Fosberry
March 2026