Sky Sailing Flies Up The iTunes Chart With ‘An Airplane Carried Me To Bed’

Robbie Daw | July 16, 2010 12:16 pm

By now Owl City fans have descended upon the fruits of Adam Young’s side project, An Airplane Carried Me To Bed by Sky Sailing. The album was made available this week digitally, with a CD release out July 27. So how did this collection of shelved jams from Young, which has been yo-yo-ing up and down with M.I.A.’s /\/\/\Y/\ for the week’s second most-downloaded new release on iTunes (both are behind Sting’s Symphonicities), come to be, you might be wondering?

“It was clear early on that it needed to be separate from Owl City,” Adam told Billboard recently. “Overall, this piece is disconnected enough to be its own thing.”

In a letter posted on Sky Sailing’s MySpace blog, one-man band Young went on to explain that the Sky Sailing material had originally been recorded three-and-a-half years ago, when he was toiling away as a metalworker in Minnesota.

“Never expecting my music to be heard anywhere but by my parents through the floorboards above, I wrote for my own ears. I was both artist and audience and I called myself Sky Sailing. “I’ve kept these recordings secret for a long time and they’ve never seen the light of day until now. Long before Owl City was ever a spark of a flame, a lot of blue-collared working days were spent absentmindedly daydreaming about what would ultimately become this collection of songs. From the perfectionist musician’s perspective, a song is never truly ‘finished’ but rather ‘abandoned’ and thus, after a lot of inspiration and reckless experimentation, I emerged from the basement with a 11 song record which I affectionately entitled, An Airplane Carried Me To Bed.”

The Billboard article goes on to explain that Young will be doing little-to-no promotion for the Sky Sailing album due to the fact that he’s been spending the summer recording the follow-up album to Owl City’s Ocean Eyes. He’ll also be heading out on tour with both Maroon 5 and John Mayer in August.

Still, Hits Daily Double reported after first day sales that An Airplane Carried Me To Bed is currently on track to sell upwards of 15,000 copies by week’s end.

Not bad for an artist who claims in the previously-mentioned MySpace blog post, “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing…”