like many people i know, i use art as a way to work through intense emotions. and, like many of them, a lot of those emotions are not pleasant ones. one well of emotion and imagery for a lot of my songs is all the rubbish i’ve been through thus far. so, you know, safe to assume that the songs are generally not happy songs.
lately, there’s been a lot not going awesomely in my life. in most every area. but, somehow, i recently had a very beautiful moment where i realised that i am at peace with my past. in some cases, it’s a general peace, and in others more specific, as i see how things i have been through that were not pleasant have led to good now.
today, with no external reason or obvious improvement in my life, i have actually been feeling very calm and hopeful. odd, but cool. and perhaps that’s why i got a random urge to flip through all the songs i’ve written the last two and a half years or so and see which of them had hope.
see, i think that even music that’s not happy can give you hope. i know that the songs that made me most sure i wasn’t alone and was going to make it through dark periods in my past had no hope in them. but just knowing someone else had felt as i was feeling and was still around and was turning it into good music? that gave me hope. but that’s not the hope i was looking for here. i wondered if i could give or was giving hope of another sort in those lyrics.
at this moment, i have lyrics for 108 songs finished, and am one verse shy of finishing number 109. i can be a bit prolific sometimes. it’s been an artistically dense two and a half years…of those, i found messages of hope in 53 songs.
do you need a moment to pause, process, pick your jaw up off the floor? because i did. even songs we’ve been playing and actively working on all this time that i didn’t think of as having hope.
but as i flipped through, i saw bits of hope, here and there. sometimes, the whole song was encouraging to me. sometimes, it started poorly but ended well. sometimes, it’s just a line in there. some of the hope is pretty straight-forward hope, like songs where i say i know i can make it or i know the relationship will make it. some of the hope is more sideways, like songs where i’m encouraging someone not to give up or i’m realising that, yeah, i want you and i can have you. really, i count anything where, if you’re paying attention, you see it’s not all just wanting and lacking and broken.
because sometimes hope is just that there is something good in all the mess. at least to me.
so when you’re having a listen or singing along, feel free to take comfort in the bits that aren’t hopeful, in knowing someone else made it through all sorts of unpleasantness (lots of someones, really, as it’s not all always about me). but be sure to know there’s hope in there. and it’s okay to hope.