The Plight

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All my world held in suspense.
Time breaks, nothing makes sense.
When I turn my back on You
do You hurt like this too?

Do You weep for me like Lazarus
when death takes me to the tomb?
Have we cast stones while You were writing in the dust?
Why does the bride despise the Groom?

You're the home I cannot find.
I'm the blind leading the blind.
Please, rescue these souls from me,
and if You will... please come rescue me.

Let me just hear Your voice, and know it
like a child, like a sheep.
All of the beauty in the sky, and in the earth below it
speaks, it speaks to me.

Speak, speak to me.
Lord, come and rescue me.



This is one of very few songs I've written that speaks of God and religion in a forthright way, though many other songs speak of a similar struggle less blatantly.
The melody to this song was written, I believe, while I was still in high-school, or maybe in the year after I graduated. I remember it was an early morning, and I was tired, and I sat down at my first keyboard and started recording one track on another. Some time later I refined it and re-recorded it.
That recording became what I viewed as a nice musical interlude to what would surely be an epic album someday. I called it "A Dark Prelude." I transferred it to the computer and some weeks afterwards I was messing around with reversing tracks to see how they would sound. Reversing this track, though brought to my ears something incredibly beautiful. It had an element of ambient sound to it, and yet there were unmistakable and brilliant lines of melody woven within it. I made a few alterations to the track and called it "A Healing Epilogue." Surely one day it would be the perfect closing to an epic album.

The melody continued to haunt me, and so I began to give it words. This was probably one year later. At least one person has told me that they like this song because of the words, so that must mean it was worth it. The idea behind the song is quite simple, and entirely true.
During this time I was putting to myself the age-old question: Why would Jesus weep for Lazarus? Didn't He know that He could bring him back to life? The first several lines of this song were written in the mindset of a conclusion that I had come to, and something that makes sense to me.
When we read of death in the Psalms, it's generally understood that we should think of a spiritual death as well as a physical one. It's understood that Jesus saves us from death, a death that is inextricably linked to the physical death that even atheists cannot deny. There is nothing more natural in the world than for us to mourn the passing of our loved ones. Perhaps this part of our DNA is in itself a kind of a prophecy. Perhaps this is given to us to help us understand the way God views a spiritual death.
And perhaps that is why Jesus wept. Because He witnessed firsthand the separation of the physically living from the physically dead, and understood the significance in it that pertains to the separation between the spiritually living and the spiritually dead.
Then, of course, I think any of us who call ourselves Christians here on earth would be lying if we did not admit that at one time we threw stones at the fallen adulteresses we've seen in the world, even while Jesus was reminding us in our hearts that we ourselves are not without sin. And then, similar to the story of Jonah (although I did not have him in mind while I wrote the song), we have sometimes despised our Groom because of His unending mercy. If this is not true of all Christians, then I will at least confidently say that it has been true of me. But I think that it is true of all Christians, at some point in each individual's life.

I've tried often to help others with my words, to help them understand God, or to help them overcome certain situations. But so often I have been the blind leading the blind. If these people are taken in by my eloquent words, they quickly find me leading them onto a dark road, adding my blindness to their own. I hope that I have done more good than harm, but I have not sufficiently reminded my friends that they ought to read the bible and seek out God on their own, and for their own sake.
Please, God, rescue these souls from me. And although I may doubt it sometimes when I view the past, I know confidently in my heart that He will come back to rescue me as well.

And this is where the song should end. Looking back now it occurs to me that this is the most Psalm-like thing I have ever written. Like so many of David's poems, this song goes through the trials of depression and earnest begging questions, but the end is inevitable.
All that truly matters is that God is good. I hear it in His voice.

Grieving H.

"No one ever told me grief felt so like fear."
The poison, paralyzing me here.
And now am I building card houses just to please my own muses?
What would she say, if she turned this way?

She was the Joy. Oh, God, help me to love You
for taking her home into Your arms.
She was the Joy, but I'm looking for You.
If I scream, let it do me no harm.

Will You go on cutting?
The Surgeon's knife is something to be feared.
Well, I'm afraid. Afraid that You Love me too dear!
You crucified Your Own Son. I know You won't spare me what I need
or what I've learned.
I've learned that You crucified Your Own Son
so You could spare me what I have earned. what I have earned.

She was the Joy. Oh, God, help me to love You
for taking her (taking her) out of my arms.
She was the Joy but I'm looking for You.
If I scream let it do me no harm.
She was the Joy. You gave and You took her away.
She was the Joy that made me come near to You,
and You have surprised me today.





I've only had one or two chances to perform this song, both times with my brother Will, who also has a deep emotional bind to it. These are all ideas adapted from the most passionate and soulful book I've ever read, a very short autobiography of C.S. Lewis that was so personal to him that he wouldn't let it be published under his real name until after he'd passed away. I used to hope that people would be interested in the song enough to take a few seconds out of their day to research it and find out what it was about. It wouldn't have been hard. If they had researched the first line of the song they would find that it is, word for word, the first line of the book. But to the best of my knowledge nobody ever did find it out on their own, so I lost quite a bit of faith in humanity. It destroyed a little bit of my naivety I suppose. It was about losing his wonderful wife to cancer. (No, it's not like A Walk to Remember. For one thing, they were both over fifty when they got married.) If you want to know the details, I highly recommend you read the book. It's very short. I am still naive enough I guess to suppose that my fervent supplication will motivate somebody out there to pick up this incredible journal. You'll also want to read about the situation from some other source, because C.S. Lewis intentionally wrote the book so that readers would not guess that it was from him. That's why he gave his love the ambiguous title, H.
One of the most emotional parts of the book for me is the part I adapted in the second verse, the part about the Surgeon and His knife. Here is the idea. Lewis is questioning whether God might be a Great Sadist instead of a Great Healer. Yes, even C.S. Lewis was struggling so much over the death of his wife that he committed this blasphemous thought. But he was being honest.
Here's the terrifying thought that he comes to. If God was a Sadist, then probably at some point he would grow weary of torturing his creations.
But if God is not a Sadist, if instead He Is the Great Healer, the Great Surgeon, if He Is cutting us open for our own good, then we have no hope of reprieve. If by the surgery He Is saving our souls, then we have no guarantee that the bodily torture will stop anytime soon. Out of this idea comes probably my most favorite quote of all time from C.S. Lewis:
"What do people mean when they say, 'I don't fear God, because I know He Is Good?' Have they never been to a dentist?"

So that's what the second verse is all about. I'm afraid that God Loves me too dearly. It's because He Loves me that He continues to cut me.
Now understand, I am really a wimp. God has not been truly brutal to me in any way. I've actually been incredibly blessed all my life. But nevertheless I relate to everything C.S. Lewis is saying here.

The rest of the song will be easily related to the book if you pick it up and read it (one more time I must highly recommend that you do). It takes less than two hours to read the whole thing from cover to cover.

I will mention one more thing. I did a little play on words. I enjoy plays on words. Probably nobody would catch it if I didn't point it out, which would be ok. But anyways.
"You gave and You took her away."
Of course, this is a rendition of the old adage, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away." This has a very settled meaning. But in the context of the song, the way the grammar works, you could interpret it the old way but you could also interpret it so that the phrase "her away" is connected to the phrase "You gave" as well as "You took." I bet that's confusing. What I'm meaning to say is this. If "her away" is applied to "You gave," then you get a different picture. "You gave her away." You know, like at a wedding. The Father gives His daughter away. If you still don't understand, don't sweat it. It's not even worth spending this paragraph on to explain a little play on words.

My Dear, Will You Return?

When, when, my Dear, will you return? Will you return to me, to me?
When, when, my Dear, will you return?
Come when the hills are gently lit against the sky.
Come when the soldiers kiss their lovers all goodbye.
Come in black, come in white.

Where, where my Dear, will you return? Will you return to me, to me?
Where, where, my Dear, will you return?
Come to the meadow where we walked among the grain.
Come to the window where we watched the moonlight wane.
Come through fog, come through rain.

How could all these heartfelt words fade without a single sigh?
The reason why I inward turn, the hope with which my spirit burns.
Will you return, my Love? Will you return?

Will you return?




I like the vagueness of this song.

I could write a story around it. I could describe in detail what exactly the situation is that made these feelings well up inside some fake character's chest. I could write a Dickensian novel and describe the small town he grew up in, the moment when he saw his Love for the first time, the unlikely circumstances that brought them together and then the unlikelier circumstances that ripped them apart so suddenly that all those words simply faded without even a sigh. Ok, I probably couldn't. Or if I did, it wouldn't be worth scratch. But I'd probably like to leave the situation open-ended even if I could fill in every detail of the history surrounding this moment.
I think some things are better this way. It's kind of nice just to sit back and speculate what this guy might have been going through when he wrote this song. One question haunts me more than any other. Could it be that the girl is dead?
Normally I despise repetitive lyrics, but this one seems okay to me, maybe because the music is so unique. Then there are enough details to build up the illusion of a complete story: walks through fields of grain and watching the moon from the windowsill. I've never before written a song that was so little substance, so much pure feeling.

But, as I've probably written before, I don't truly feel that I've written this tune. More like it was buried somewhere and I dug it up and dusted it off. But that digging was some hard work. I'm not meaning to say that I didn't have to work hard at the song, but the ultimate result is hardly something I can think of taking back down and changing it around again. Some chump said that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's a crock.

I invite you to invent your own story around this little ditty. Maybe someday I'll be brave enough to make my own concrete.

video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSKqYWP1vdM

By the Morning

I shall wait here, wait 'til daybreak, 'til the sun lights up the windowsill.
The fog lies thick and opaque on the houses, and on the hills,
and still my heart is longing for some change to come on the landscape.

To show me that the night would finally end,
and that you'd be here by the morning.

I can hear the train, it rumbles far away, but still I know
it carries on, taking its people to places where they long to go.
It swells my heart to think that I'm moving so slow
from night to night with nowhere else to go

but you show me that the night would finally end...

and that you'll be here by the morning.






I wrote this song probably about 6 months ago. It's always been one of my favorites because of its succinctness.
That's the hardest thing for me in music, is to portray an idea with enough vagueness so that the listener can fill in the cracks. So many songs I've written have been five or six minutes long because I felt a need at the time to make crystal clear what I was communicating, then more often than not I ended up with a throw-away song. But this song is very short, and very small in scope. It's a simple song about hope and anticipation.
It's got a train in it, which I like.

It swells my heart to think that I'm moving so slow, from night to night with nowhere else to go.
It's true, I am behind. I've never had a chance to make any real quality recordings of the songs I love. I have written a plethora of songs but I've always seemed to lack the chance to share them with someone. I do love these songs, but something like that doesn't really reach its potential until you can share it with someone else and see that it touches them. I'd like my music to touch someone someday. It has happened in fleeting moments in the past, but seldom. More often I've been told that my music makes for a great sedative.

To This Land

I have to say, this is one of my favorites. This song is probably at least four years old, it's one of two acoustic guitar songs I wrote with the same four chords.
I may have said this before, but when it comes to a lot of these songs I truly don't feel like a "composer." I feel more like a miner. It's more like you just start fiddling around with notes until something predetermined and buried is uncovered. Now that I've studied music quite a bit I fashion it more into what I planned for it to be, but the material there is not something I can build. But this early song was definitely one of only a few that I immediately recognized as a little vein of gold.

I went through a lot of strife, I remember, in trying to name this song because I didn't want people to get presuppose that it's patriotic. It's not. In fact, when I wrote this song I was still relatively unsullied with the study of politics.
It's about waking up for the second time. I went through a very dark phase of life in middle and high school that made me numb and disillusioned, but then coming out of high school I started to notice things again. I started taking walks in the park and seeing the glint of the ripples in the gray Columbia River. I noticed the pavement, how it was broken out of place by tree roots, and it reminded me of being very small. I must have walked here once before. I remembered for the first time that I used to be the youngest part of a young family. The rows of carefully planted trees on the crest of the hill across the river, the bright leaves storming down like colored snow in late fall, the fragrance of the grapes of distant vineyards in the summer. All those things surrounded me when I was a child but I never recognized them. Then I went away for a long time, but now I was back home.
That's what this song is about.




I recall younger days when life was more than just work and play,
when all that we could not explain was something we could celebrate.
And I recall joyful tears, smiles spread from ears to ears,
before everything was measured, before we counted out our years,
and before boredom explained away all our fears.

Come into my heart, Dear. Complicated my life.
Something deep inside me here is screaming it's not right. It's not right.

I'm convinced that our lives were not meant to simply ignore one-another until we've been spent.
To be worn, as with erosion. And I will not be disillusioned,
for I feel the Love You've sent me.

So come into my heart, Dear. Complicate my life.
Something deep inside me here is screaming it's not right.

And all I need is something I can't understand.
And all I need is something I can't comprehend.
And all I need is something not concrete to hold within my hand,
within my hand.

And so You brought me to this land.




When I wrote the song I was still young and naive enough to honestly desire some girl to come into my life and complicate everything around me, and maybe I haven't quite overcome that weakness.
I know it's kind of a counter-intuitive idea, because typically we think in terms of how complicated this adult life is compared to what we call the simple life, being a kid in the backyard dirt. But that's not what I feel. Invoking these childhood feelings complicates my worldview with a desire for adventure, looking at life with newness, enjoying the mysteries of life without always feeling a need to explain them away.
It's also kind of strange still to use the word Dear, when there's really no girl that I can apply this kind of inspiration to. Somehow I was envisioning a girl when I wrote the song, but it was really was always very clear who the song really was about.

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Legalized Infanticide

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A stranger comes to my bedside, stands over me while I sleep,
comes into my room from the outside, from the darkest shadow creeps.
Who would have thought that he'd come here, into the sanctity of my home?
I never even knew the fear. Never knew I wasn't alone.
Darkness veils this barren land devoid of all hope and love
as he stretches out a bloodstained hand concealed behind a heavy black glove.

And it's murder! As he reaches for my throat,
then runs off with footsteps soft, concealed behind an ominous black coat.

(Act II)
The woman comes to a surgeon hoping for some peace of mind,
and yet shrinking away from the bludgeon that she has come to find.
The surgeon's in it for money to assassinate a defenseless foe
with a weapon of expert cunning. And through this, the apathy grows.
Darkness veils this fertile land devoid of all hope and love
as he stretches out a bloodstained hand concealed behind a white glove.

And it's murder in new words! As he reaches for the womb,
the words come from his own mother:
"I'd love to bring you into this world, but there just isn't enough room."

Is this genocide? Is it all a lie to take away his life?
But we turn a blind eye to the homicide, we're accomplices to this crime.
Oh, it's such a shame. He never even had a name,
never knew the joy of this life, never opened up his little eyes.

Darkness veils this barren land devoid of all hope and love,
and he stretches out a bloodstained hand concealed behind a lawful white glove.

And it's murder in new words as he reaches for the womb.
The words come from his own mother:
"I'd love to bring you into this world, but there just isn't enough room"

Is this genocide? Is it all a lie to take away his life?
But we turn a blind eye to this homicide, accomplices to this crime.
Oh, it's such a shame. He never even had a name,
never knew the joy of this life, never opened up his eyes.
We all cry for the mother and the pain that she must feel within...

...but no one cries for him.




This is an older song I wrote, probably about three years ago, I remember it was one of the first songs I ever wrote in a minor key and during a time when I hardly yet comprehended what that phrase meant.

We should all be viewing this issue with close and critical scrutiny especially in light of the Kermit Gosnell case, where not only what I call infanticide was perpetrated, but also what every right-thinking person calls infanticide. I hope we can all agree that once the baby is living outside of the womb it is a baby.

I know that abortion is thought of as a women's rights issue, but I don't care about that when life is at stake. The first and most fundamental right is the right to live. How can we have come here? Does the pain a person has suffered really justify them for hurting, let alone killing, another person? When it comes to abortion I only ask one question. Is it murder or is it not murder? You cannot have it both ways. If it is murder then it is always murder. If it is not murder then it is never murder. People who want to call it two different ways in two different circumstances make me crazy with grief. That we should kill someone for having an evil father, or even just because he or she is an inconvenience to us. Oh, God, help us.

The first verse of this song is a kind of a symbolic parable. Each one of us young adults could well have been aborted at the whim of our mothers, and that is a sobering thought. And when we stand by and let it happen, we are no better than accomplices. We may as well lay our coats at the feet of Saul the Pharisee.

I use the word genocide in this song as a play on the word. Of course, abortion, at least today, has nothing to do with what we call genocide, but I used it to convey the idea that a person is killing his or her own genes.

How do we know what we've destroyed when we end a life before it's even begun? We've all been charmed by children who are seeing things for the first time and excited and happy to live in such a large and vibrant world. What have we done by denying the joy of this life to our unloved children?


Ben Folds wrote a song years ago called "Brick" and it wasn't supposed to say anything moralistic, it was only meant to incite pity and express the emotional pain he and his girlfriend went through when they aborted their child. It is musically a good song, but there is nothing more contemptible to me than someone who after having committed a murder wants you to refrain from calling them out on it but at the same time wants you to feel pity for their guilt-feelings.

... but no one cries for him.

Only Waiting

This is another song that is several years old, and though for a time it was one of my favorites it hardly ever saw light of day. I believe I played it live only once in a small coffee shop where only a few people came to watch. But in those days every show was a great opportunity. I recorded it and shelved it and forgot all about it until recently I had to dig through storage to salvage whatever was still worthy of time and effort.
This song was definitely in a sense the Don Quixote in my heart coming out. I'd spent my life in books (still do, perhaps more than I ought to) and finally finding myself more independent (so this must have been shortly after I'd graduated from high school) I discovered that I was standing in a wide world where I'd never even bothered to look past the walls of the buildings where I slept and learned and ate. In my small way I began to fantasize about how wonderful it would be to pick up and move away, to truly live. At this period my best option was just walking down to the park and marveling at the Columbia River, but like Don Quixote making giants out of windmills I carved my own story-line out of the wild desert landscape.
But every Don Quixote must have his Sancho Panza. What really turns a good adventure bright is a faithful companion. No doubt in the writing of this song I envisioned someone entirely unlike Sancho, most likely a girl of course. But never mind. The point is that while an adventure of one's own is thrilling, to be able to share something like that with someone special seems to really be what life is made of.




There's magic in these moments so keep your eyes wide open.
You will never have a second chance to be a witness to this second.
This town where I was born and raised fades into lights among the hills and the highways,
the rills and the byways.

So won't you take this chance? Won't you take the fall?
Won't you give up everything you've always been terrified to death of losing?
Because our bags are packed, our tickets paid, and everything has been arranged.
Now I am only waiting for you to say, "Take me away."

There's mystery all around us.
I think that God has found us.*
If I thought it was our victory that would invalidate the mystery.
No, I was searching in the darkest depths for something I was trying to get
but something took a hold of me in a flash of brilliant lightning.

Someone's in the rain...

Won't you take the chance won't you give up everything?
You've been terrified.
Our bags are packed tickets paid and everything has been arranged.
Now I am only waiting for you to say "Take me away."


*I should point out that this is a statement that I've heard a lot of different people say something similar too. I believe we have all stolen it from C.S. Lewis, at least I know I did. The point is that we often think that it's entirely up to us to find God out by looking in the right places. Hogwash. C.S. Lewis has said that perhaps what matters is not that we find God but that God find us.


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Carry Me Away

"Are God's consolations not enough for you, words spoken gently to you? Why has your heart carried you away and why do your eyes flash so that you vent your rage against God and pour out such words from your  mouth?" -Eliphaz

The strength is on me, but I've fallen too far.  My wits have never been sharper and yet all these clear and concise lines of human wisdom swim around in my head, each distorting the other. I can see nothing to be fully true or false. This would all be so much simpler if I could just convince myself to be an agnostic.
Meanwhile I've pulled everything in this world apart to see how it all works, even my own befuddled mind. This insatiable search for the exhaustive answer leaves the world cold and dark. Even the clouds are giving away to these bright evening stars. They shine like gods, and they are far away like any god must be. It's not to be wondered at that so many different nations have taken to worshiping them at different points of history. But do they hear my song? Do you hear my desperate song? They don't reply, gods never do.
So why am I still praying to them? I've prayed to pagan gods and searched the stars for signs but none of it is fulfilling, and none of it has made a difference. There was a time when I thought that the right philosophy would solve every puzzle. Then there was a time when I was convinced that scientific exploration would answer every question. Yes, I've been at it late into the night to find something satisfying. I've studied life and death and planted seeds in time.
Still everything feels wrong. Do you hear my desperate song?

Carry me away on your blind faith before I get carried away with my studies. Or is it too late?
Even these overlapping patterns have turned chaotic. Everything is circulating.
Now is it all just useless love and hating? Is life a sham? Is purpose a ghost? Is it in all triviality that we learn to despise Adolf Hitler and champion Abraham Lincoln?
Carry me away with your illogical love before I get carried away by my despair.
I've found so many facts and so many perspectives, but nothing here can stop the aching.
I don't even know if I exist.
But if this heart is true, then it must be breaking.

Mythology, scientific understanding; neither seems objectively better than the other. Can all this chemistry explain away the fight we all face? Does Darwinism give an explanation for self-examination? Or is mythology the only hope for light? Must we die on our blind beliefs about what gave us life and knowledge? I've seen Prometheus make fools of scientists. But in the end he's no good. He does his dance with the animals beneath him and then disappears into the smoke of soberness. And our self-righteous descendants will be left to wonder how we could have been so foolish to believe such nonsense.

Do you hear my song? Does anyone hear my song? If a man prays and God does not exist to hear it, does his soul make a sound?

I don't even know if I exist. But one thing I do know.
If this heart is true, then it must be breaking.

Take Your Time

Spare me just one moment, won't you sing me a song?
I just need to hear your voice. I haven't heard you sing in so very long.

Stay, just a chorus? Or a verse, if you're there.

Maybe something I'd recognize or a long-forgotten air.

You said you just didn't have the time.

So here, take some of mine.

Because this could be the last chance to say it right,

so hold on tight and take your time. Take your time.

Sun rises like yeast on the hillside, slanting rays through the trees

and the song it awakens on my lips brings back such memories.

We were both so young, catching moths in the grass.

We've been through some hard times but the memories, they're finally coming back.

You said you just didn't have the time.

So here, take some of mine.

Because this could be the last chance to say it right,

so hold on tight and take your time.

This could be the last chance to say goodnight,

so hold on tight and take your time. Take your time.

This is a song I wrote a few years ago, and time has endeared this song to me rather than having desensitized me to it. There is nothing extremely special in the message. It says what it means essentially. This is a good companion song to "The Simple Things" because it has such a similar message, studded with some memories from my childhood: the slanting rays of sunlight through pine trees and catching moths in the grass on a warm summer night. It's always with reluctance that I look back to those times because I am afraid my memory is poor and I looking back I really can't see a child who was anything like what I have become. But these few images steal in, and it conjures up a momentary feeling in me that is not so nostalgic as much as it is curious. That probably doesn't make any sense.

I do remember once before I wrote this song, I used to drive myself and my brother to high school and it was on his large gray binder that I saw a phrase carved with a black pen. "Take My Time." I imagine it served as a reminder for him to not act hastily with anything, but I believe it was from this that I worked out the phrase, "You said you just didn't have the time. So here, take some of mine." Many of the songs I write begin that way, with a general idea, then a single clever line. There you've got the subject of the picture and all you need is to fill in a landscape behind it.

Loneliness is a Blessing

This is a song I wrote in high school. It's a story that I've never personally experienced, but that I have witnessed, and it would be hard to live in the modern world without witnessing it. This song is a story about casual and dishonest love, but it breaks in on the mind of the protagonist at a moment of brutal honesty.

Loneliness is such a blessing. To get lost in a crowd, to put down your stifling mask, it is freeing but it is cold. In all my past life I've only been afraid of being alone, and outwardly in shallow conversations I will still conform to that idea because it's something that people understand. But I can feel my heart digressing from what I'm screaming out loud. They could not understand, how could they? I don't even really understand it, that this great evil, Loneliness, could somehow be a blessing.
But at least the tension of a dying passion is ended. At least there is some kind of rest from exhaustion in loneliness. At least this agony is something that I can relate to. This is pain, but a familiar pain. I've come home, even if home is a prison cell.

Your welcoming arms! Were they just a dream? That's how they seem to me.
At the start there was at least some illusion of joy and hope. But she knew that I never really believed it. And she didn't mind.

So I resigned my hopes and fears, as she had done long ago, and I gave what was left of my heart to her, though she was just a mere friend. There was never any nonsense, no confusion. She took it only on the strict mutual understanding that I'd never get lost in love again. She took it on the condition that the heart must never beat.
From there the story is old. As friends we slowly grew apart, and we never did grow to love each other, we never were foolish enough to believe that we were lovers at heart. Our contract was lined out very clearly in her demands, she wanted nothing but the chemistry. Chemistry, what a cold resolve! But everything else was foolishness. There was no soul, there was only chemistry.
And hard times came upon me.
But when I asked her to take my hand, she looked at me coldly. She saw my heart begin to beat and bleed, and she gave me to understand that that broken heart was mine and mine alone. The contract was broken. The broken heart always had been mine and mine alone.

Loneliness is such a blessing. How could it be? How could I be relieved to be here on the outside on my own?
But loneliness is such a blessing.



A short (or maybe not) afterword. This song was for me mainly a song of bitterness. I looked around on people my own age in shallow and very temporary relationships, making the most of what they called life, but I was always an outcast. From the cold on the outside I consoled myself with the vengeful thought that I would be better off than them in the long run because loneliness ultimately was a blessing. Like the man in my song, they too would eventually find themselves in the cold without a friend because they'd never taken the time to love with anything apart from chemistry. It was wrong of me to look down on them as I did, but I don't know how else I could have survived. I retained the will to go on partly because I knew that their love, which I even felt a yearning to be part of, was fake, but my loneliness was real.
But as is often the case, I had hardly worked all this out in my mind, or any of it really for that matter, in the moment of writing the song. And I still treasure this song, despite the bitter spirit that I wrote it in, because it does still carry truth. Today the song inspires both bitterness and compassion in me for those who live a life with a mere chemistry-based love.
But the best part is that the story is not over. Several months later another song was to come.

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