This song was inspired by 3 separate dreams! First one I was given a song title - I was simply telling a dream character I was writing a song called “Inner Victim II” - of which I wrote a song called “Inner Victim” for my album before this.

I was pretty annoyed by this actually! There was no feeling of what the song would be like or how it would differentiate itself. So, I actually told my dreams that unless you were going to give me more, I wasn’t going to write the song lol.

Then I had a dream some 6 months later, while I was writing other songs, where I was at another local musicians house freestyling with him. He put on a really haunting beat and I could only get out two lines before I’d get stuck (freestyling has always been a hang up for me, coincidentally brings up inadequacies aka victim stuff). The two lines were everything I needed though to see how this song about the inner victim could be different from the first. The two lines open both verses: “My life has been hard, and I’m just trying to tell it from my heart.”

A third dream gave me the first lines for the chorus: “I still hope and dream for tomorrow, though I’m so stuck on yesterday.”

I really struggled while writing this song. The first Inner Victim song was so raw and honest that everything I was writing for this one felt so forced and surface in comparison. I literally scrapped and rewrote the entire first verse several times because I would sit back and ask the victim space within if I had told his story truthfully enough and I kept feeling a pinch in my gut like I hadn’t. It was becoming quite maddening. It worked me HARD.

While this song is not so raw and in your face as the first Inner Victim song, this song is more of a reclamation and shows the relationship that I have developed with that place within me in the years since, where we’re not scrapping it out with each other, he simply wants to tell his story - his/my life has been hard, and we just want to tell it from our hearts.

I am standing on the side of a street playing the guitar like I’ve never played the guitar before. I don’t even know how to play the guitar outside of a handful of chords. I don’t have a shred of shame in my body, it’s the most ecstatic feeling I’ve ever felt. I’m singing a song that is calling the mythic direction of the East into my life. The East, in my ancestral lineage, being connected to Spring and new life. The verse leads into a really gorgeous, expansive chorus where the only line I can recall of anything I sang is: “all of creation is a song of praise.” I wake up.

I tried to recreate what I heard the best I could, but that chorus was so huge, like it felt like it redeemed all of life. I couldn’t touch it and was hitting a serious wall. So, eventually I scrapped what I had and told myself to start over completely.

My hands landed on a certain chord and this whole chord progression fell out of me that was so deep, haunting, and full of yearning. It suddenly touched a place inside of me that cried out for spring, for new life, after a very long winter. And I weeped writing this, feeling that deep ache for something more meaningful to fully arise. And so, I leaned more fully into the first part of that dream instead of trying to write the song that would redeem all of life and wrote the song that would redeem my own.

I am sitting with my father on a park bench. He begins telling me a story about how he was betrayed by someone he knew in his early adult life. Felt like it was an experience that still claimed him. My boss is listening in on speaker phone and when my father reaches a certain part of his story, my boss asks him to repeat a part because he thinks we should really hear that again. And when my father begins retelling that part he sings it this time. And this incredibly haunting piece of music rises up in the dream and his voice is so unbelievable and haunting itself. He can’t sing that well in waking life and I’m gobsmacked. I am so affected by this in the dream I have to walk away for a moment and gather myself. On one hand I feel like “omg, he is who I get it from!” and that feels so validating and on the other hand I wrestle with - well, if you can sing like that, why did it feel like you never really supported me creatively!? Just before the dream ends, I realize this thing that happened in his early twenties must have really rocked him and scared him away from pursuing his music and now its hard to affirm it within me because he not only doesn’t want me to experience the same hurt, but it rubs against his own. And I wake up wrestling with these feelings.

I didn’t even consider this a dream where it was inspiring music. But the two weeks that followed it I had this song that was just hanging on my body. This old energy that just felt like if I didn’t put it into song it was going to ruin me. And the feeling was a heavy one about wanting to tell my son all the things I want him to hear from me as a father.

When I shared this dream with a friend he helped me realized two things: 1) “I think I hear a song wanting to be written here - do you not?” Blew my mind. Couldn’t believe I couldn’t see it. But I was so wrapped up in the ending, I missed the fact there was this gorgeous song from a father being sung and what would it mean for me to write that song from my father? 2) He helped me recognize that my father’s “story” in this dream was my own lol. Something happened in my twenties that almost scared me off the path of writing music. So, it’s showing me that I haven’t been a good creative father, out of my hurt I haven't been affirming my worth to myself as a songwriter.

I realized that song I had started writing was THIS song and hadn’t even realized it. Was wild! It became a song of words from my father to me, from me to my son, and from the father in me to the child in me. It’s very layered!

There are hints in this dream of my actual relationship with my music and my father and about 6 months later from this dream I would have a waking life experience that helped me realize that the reason I have always aimed to write deep, meaningful music was growing up watching how easily music revealed this vaulted man to me and how special that was to me to be able to peer into his soul a bit. So, it’s quite beautiful in this dream that the seed is planted, though still unconscious, that “he is who I get this from.” I shared that with him and it has changed the whole way we each relate to each other surrounding my music, it’s been so beautiful!

I wanted to write a song about my grapplings with death. And I wrote two very beautiful verses that really cracked me open and I had kind of a weak chorus. I got a little stuck on where to go with it to finish it, if it wanted or needed a third verse or bridge or not.

So, I sat on it for a little bit and wrote other songs in the meantime. And eventually I had a dream that really changed the whole trajectory of the song in a really beautiful way!

I was given a couple lines in a dream that went: “We’ve got to be prepared, and make peace with fact - that no one leaves here alive,
We’re all gonna end up 6 ft under, face forward to the sky.”

The first two verses were pretty deep reflections about how I feel when I get to the end of my life I’m going to want to feel this again - all of this. But, as I continued down the path this snippet of lyrics was leading me, the verse that came through spoke more so to the need to live life so fully that when you get to the end of your life you’ve given it all you’ve got and you can find peace in letting it go.

It doesn’t make the first two verses any less true, but definitely ends the song encouraging all of us to take greater responsibility and ownership over the depth and fullness of which we live our lives.