ABOUT THIS TRACK:

Sleep used to be my safe space. I rarely had dreams, could fall asleep so easily, and always woke up feeling good and ready and like I'd slept off whatever difficulty the prior day had held.

In the winter of 2020-2021, I started having consistent nightmares for the first time in my life. It was like real life couldn't hold all of the hard things my brain was trying to process, and so it was spilling into my subconscious brain. Death, fire, disease, car accidents, violence. The kind of nightmares I'd wake myself up from in a cold sweat and my heart beating out of my chest. Sleep stopped feeling restful and my mental health plummeted.

I wrote this song about being afraid to fall asleep. Afraid that the only place that I used to be able to hide from the world in was now tainted with strife, too. While the songs I write tend to be a little melancholy and heavy, I wasn't really sure how to convey these dark, violent scenes in a way that didn't feel like too much. I tried to keep the lyrics somewhat vague and less detailed than I've been in the past, which felt safer, but still left something missing from the gravity of darkness I was trying to convey.

The process of creating music with Jordan has been the greatest addition to my life over the last couple of years. I'll write a simple melody and a few lyrics and share it with him and see what he thinks. Sometimes he says "I could add a few sparkles" and sometimes I see the gears in his brain clicking and creating and hitting the ground - running and on fire.

This was one of those "running and on fire" songs - the sounds Jordan was showing me conveyed so much of the uneasiness and darkness I felt in writing the song, but helped to to ease the sentiment in a way that felt like I could distance myself from the pain I had felt last winter, and without subjecting anyone to lyrics that were too much.

Pain is powerful. Music is powerful. I spend a lot of time trying to balance my love of heavy, sad music with grasping at anything happy these days. Balancing the grief and sadness and heartbreak of real life with the care of the people that hear it - I want you to feel related to and understood - but I don't want to break your heart more. I want you to hear yourself in my words and be comforted by the sounds. I hope that Jordan and I have been able to accomplish that with this song.

I couldn't be more excited to have the honor of making songs in this way right now and to be sharing them with you. Thank you for listening and for your love. There is more to come. The future may be scary, but I am grateful to be here in this moment with you.