At its heart, the song is a poetic reflection on the stunning force of the natural world. Davison, the songwriter, had been a purveyor of paisley-tinted pop-rock explorations. Here, he paints a soundscape as abstract as intoxicating. There's a weird beauty in the contradictions, lo-fi electronics wrought against the glisten of psychedelic guitar tones and the eerie whirrs of the Otamatone (the Japanese toy/synthesizer ) as it snakes its way through the mix like alien birdsong. The result has an exhilarating, live-wire feeling, which is as unrestrained as genre-agnostic. "Why Do We Need A God?" prods lightly and wittily at the primal human desire for divine explanation. The song's central question is posed not in cynicism but in wide-eyed wonder. Davison's delivery is intimate and probing, drawing you closer to listen in as a friend confesses their strangest notions on an endless starry walk.
There's something refreshingly brave about a song that dares to connect the dots between salamanders and spirituality, between the dark cloud of 536 A.D. and the neon glow of modern synthesizers. It's all in service of Davison's cosmic witches' brew of a view of the world, how everything is imbued with meaning by observation, not doctrine. "Why Do We Need A God?" is a thought experiment, a philosophical postcard from a universe in which nature, history, and art pose some of the questions that religion quickly dampens. On this track, Dennis Davison is out to prove that music doesn't have to shout to shake the soul sometimes but just needs to ask itself a question out loud.
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