Notes:

This week’s song is about the feeling you get when it is time to give up something that has been a huge part of you. It is about the hole that is left in you when you give up a big part of yourself. I thought for a while about how particular that emotion is; how specifically human it is. The very existence of this emotion is wrapped up in how we construct our identities. This is something that seems to be unique to us in the animal kingdom, so I began to wonder about the first people who could truly feel this. Perhaps that was the moment when we first became human. I thought of all the billions of people walking around with these feelings, and those who preceded them, and I started to realize that with so much collective experience with having a hole in one’s heart, there is bound to be somebody out there who knows how to mend it. In the context of this song, that is the meaning of hope: that in all the combined experience of mankind and our ancestors, somebody knows how to properly deal with a hard feeling. The song is written in broad conceptual strokes, which seems to be appropriate since the topic of the song is so broad and conceptual. Of course it comes from a specific place, but I won’t get into it so you can superimpose your own specifics over it. I worry that if I always describe in detail exactly why I wrote a song, I’ll rob listeners of extracting their own meaning. Do you have a hole that you are trying to fill in? It’s okay, I think most of us do.

Here’s hoping your Monday doesn’t totally suck.

~Jesse