Randy Described the Land of Oden

I was listening to a live show on a ’60s music station to get my weekly dose of Boomeralia* when a listener called in and requested “Land of Oden” by Peter and Gordon, and I was instantly struck by a memory-lash from another song, a favorite of my generation’s college rock gems.

Immediately, I recognized this song. Not because I’d heard it before — but because I’d heard something very much like it many times.

It has the same basic structure and lyrical content as Built to Spill’s “Randy Described Eternity.”

Two Songs, One Echo

Built to Spill released “Randy Described Eternity” in 1997 on their album Perfect From Now On. It begins, not with campfire strings, but with brooding guitars — indie-rock waves that cradle a cosmic metaphor: a massive metal sphere passing near Earth every thousand years. A man climbs to his rooftop, strikes it once with a feather. Over incomprehensible ages, that feather-tap regimen shrinks the sphere to the size of a pea — and that pea is still “half a blink in the place you’re gonna be.”

Tracing the Shared Lineage

With a little digging, I found that Land of Oden — beyond being a mellow 1960s folk-pop song — belongs to a deeper tradition. It’s a camp song, once popular in youth-group camps and scout-style programs across North America. The origin of its imagery goes even further back: to a 1920s book called The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon, where a “rock in Svithjod” is said to be slowly worn down by a bird sharpening its beak once every thousand years. The metaphor has circulated for nearly a century through folk songs, sermons, and youth-group stories.

Meanwhile, for Randy Described Eternity, Doug Martsch says the imagery came from a youth-group leader, “Randy,” who used the metaphor as a warning about eternal damnation.

Although Built to Spill didn’t lift the folk song directly, they — and before them, the youth-leader who told the story — are drawing from the same mythic metaphor: two branches of a single old tree.

Bonus nerdy material: Eternity, According to Randy – Nicholas Drachman’s (Bio)Physics Blog describes how to calculate eternity as described by Randy!!

Also – the song inspired the artwork used as the featured image for this post is available as a print here: Sam Williams – Randy Described Eternity

*Boomeralia is my term for Boomer nostalgia that I love to dig into for gems like this. It is also used to describe Boomerang culture in other countries. What goes around comes around – and comes back again and again.