002 I’LL FIND MY WAY OUT

I wrote this one last of the whole batch.  I sat down one day, and it came out rather quickly. Not all of the lyrics, but it was one of the ideas that seemed like it had already existed and I was just dictating it from some player in my head.  You can hear it in this memo below from the day I started it – ungracefully stumbling into it, but it’s there.

What came out that day was not what it would become.  The first version of this song was a lot more frustrated.

There were a number of times around the time of having and losing Annie Kate (AK, moving forward), where I spoke with people and needed some support, or a safe space, or an open ear. Sometimes that happened.  …but sometimes people said really insensitive things. They may have been trying to be encouraging or to find a way to articulate a reason that someone would lose a child, or trying to fit some round version of what they believe about God into the square hole of what I was going through.  It’s a conversation that happened too many times, to be honest.  If I found myself in one of those types of situations, I would really try to think the best of people and to know that they have no idea how much damage they’re doing. And I would be wanting to get off of the phone, or to find my way out of that moment.  

That was the start of this song at least. Musically, this song has a little bit of late-90’s/early 00’s angst in it, and it was like that immediately.  I had that main melody line which could have been tied to the sentiment of being frustrated…?  I loved something about this song, or the bones of it at that stage, but I didn’t like the idea of having a victim-mentality type song on this project.  That’s never been a part of making any of this. So, I let this song sit for a while before coming back to it. When I listened back to the Voice Memos after some time away from it, I thought about the line, ‘I’ll find my way out,’ which felt like it was a core idea on the song itself. I started thinking about that line maybe meaning something different than I originally thought, and I decided that the biggest flip of that line’s original direction, would be for it to be a song of hope to myself.  More like a way to talk to a past version of yourself and say “You’re going to be OK.  You’re going to find your way out.”
 
Lyrically, Verse 1 and the chorus hash through everything above. Verse 2 was a big turning point for me and my understanding of this project as a whole. My oldest daughter is the only kiddo we had that was older than AK, and she’s amazing. One of the ways that she has processed her grief is to paint her baby sister into all of her art. If she’s drawing our family, to this day, she includes Annie Kate, and will correct anyone that gets the count of children in our family wrong based on what they see. My wife, Nicole, has continued working through her grief in a beautiful different way. She became interested in monarch butterflies and started buying milkweed plants to put around our house to attract the world of caterpillars transforming into butterflies to our doorstep.  
There are obvious correlations with grief and butterflies, but while I have processed everything internally through writing poetry/songs/etc, Nicole has processed externally, and put milkweed outside our back door so we have constant colorful reminders of our sweet girl.
 
 
I’ll Find My Way Out
 
 

LYRICS

 

each day is a weighted stone

each step is a way to go home

this road could take me there

but then the lights go out

 

I feel the red dot on my back

I don’t wanna live like that

if you could see the walls inside my head

if I could hear the words you never said

 

maybe I’m wrong

but I can’t seem to find my place again

feeling alone

always tongue-tied to the master plan

I’ll find my way out

 

your eyes held a setting sun

mine held crying flowers for one

your sister paints you into things

she was always a dreamer like me

Mama plants the milkweed by the back door

she’s drawing you in

if you could see the walls inside my head

if I could hear the words you never said

 

I can’t seem to find my place again

feeling alone

always tongue tied to the master plan

I’ll find my way out

 

It’s the sound of hoping

shapes in light through an opening door 

I watch my shadow leave my feet

’cause I know you better than I know myself anymore