When I first wrote this song, I thought for sure that I had unconsciously plagiarized the melody. I knew the lyrics were all mine, but I thought I must have heard this melody somewhere before. This haunted me for years. I was afraid to play it out of fear that I would be exposed as a fraud for having stolen someone else’s melody. It’s been over a decade, and I still haven’t heard the song that I worried I might have ripped off because I never did.
What I experienced shortly after I wrote the song was an unusual familiarity with a song that I had only just written. I think I woke up in the middle of the night, and I wrote it, and I was somewhere between a dream and reality, and we experience the world differently there. Our senses are looser, and we let certain things in that we normally shut out because to let all the information in that we receive would be too much to process. Yet, that’s where a lot of my writing happens, but not normally, while the dew is still fresh from the dream.
I wasn’t sleeping well at all, and I was very much alone or felt that way. It’s hard to be truly alone in New York City. I was probably in the middle of the grieving process over the end of my relationship with my ex. We had been together for several years. We had lived together, and marriage seemed like a real possibility to both of us and yet there I was, alone. It was a new reality that I was still trying to wrap my head around.
There was a certain childishness to my experience. Emotionally, pain can strip away years of maturity and turn us into children again. But maybe it was just the crying. And yet, despite my childishness, I was also enveloped into a world-weariness like a thousand-year-old man. Wandering the streets of New York late at night will do that to you. You see people struggling at that hour. I was one of them, and I was wandering, because I found the best way to get to sleep was to keep moving until I could move no more.
At the height of this emotional experience, I had a very tenuous grasp on reality. I wasn’t exactly seeing things, but the physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation were playing tricks on me. How strange that out of such chaos, we can create a kind of order in our art.
I was everywhere all at once before that phrase was available to me. Everywhen too. Every age. It almost sounds godlike, but it was the opposite of that. I was at the mercy of everywhere, everywhen and every age. Somehow, though, I managed to send up this flare to myself. Something deep within me wanted me to know that help was on its way. Something that knows more than I do on a conscious level.
Some days, we go about our conscious lives unaware that another one of us lies dormant inside, quietly making subtle suggestions that reverberate mysteriously into our lives. When we are disconnected, this force can seem like a stranger pulling our strings. But sometimes, when you are in the depths of despair, and you finally surrender to the force that you have been so afraid of, you find that it is actually trying to guide it. It’s not a stranger, but your friend. And when you truly know that source of your own mind, it can feel like a long-lost friend. Something instantly familiar. I wrote this song, and it seemed like someone else had already written it because someone had, but that someone was also me. A deeper part of me was trying to tell me something I needed to hear. Sometimes the key to writing is not being a good talker and having something important to say, but being a good listener.