As I look back on my career, I consider myself profoundly blessed. I’ve sold over 100 million records, packed arenas across the globe, and brought leopard-print velvet into the cultural mainstream. Are there things I’d change? Not many. But as the years pass, one glaring error weighs heavily on my conscience.
I’m writing today to publicly retract one of the greatest regrets of my career.
It was the late ’90s. I was on top of the world. My best friend and I had yet to swap husbands, and I was in the middle of writing Come On Over. In a moment of creative hubris, I penned a casual, throwaway line in a track that, let’s be honest, is still an absolute fucking banger:
“Okay, so you’re a rocket scientist… That don’t impress me much.”
I am here to set the record straight. That statement was wrong then, and it is wrong now. Aerospace engineering is extremely impressive!
I owe the scientific community a long-overdue apology. For nearly three decades, I have unfairly maligned a field that serves as the bedrock of human progress. To begin with, “rocket science” isn’t even the preferred nomenclature. It’s a lazy colloquialism for complex aerospace engineering and orbital mechanics. We should all strive for precision in our language, and I promise to do better from this moment on.
Furthermore, I flippantly treated the discipline as if it were some monolith. It’s not! It is an extraordinary convergence of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, propulsion theory, computational mathematics, and advanced materials science. I did not grasp the nuance of delta-v or escape velocity when I recorded the vocal track in 1997, but I have spent the intervening years educating myself.
You may ask: Why now? Why is the Queen of Country Pop seeking absolution all these years later?
First of all, I’m Canadian. Apologizing is in my DNA. I still lose sleep over the time I accidentally walked out of a Sudbury Tim Hortons with an unpaid-for Cruller in 1994.
Second, lockdown did strange things to us all. During COVID, I forgot my Wi-Fi password at my estate in Switzerland and was forced to rely on physical media. The local municipal library only had DVDs of Seasons 3 and 4 of The Big Bang Theory. Watching Dr. Sheldon Cooper navigate theoretical physics, which, while distinct from aerospace engineering, but shares a spiritual rigor, unlocked something deep within me. The man invented his own catchphrase! Bazinga! That is cultural real estate you simply cannot buy.
Watching those episodes on a loop during quarantine forced a profound reckoning. I realized that sending a payload into low-Earth orbit requires a level of human ingenuity that deserves our utmost reverence.
So, to NASA, the cast of October Sky, and every bright-eyed kid dreaming of a career at Jet Propulsion Laboratory: I was wrong. I hear you, I see you, and I stand corrected. Rocket science does, in fact, impress me… a lot!
Brad Pitt can still get bent, though.
