Trying to explain a feeling. Where to listen to All I Want Is Home (out this Friday), and how to listen to it before then (scroll to the bottom!).
An Unquenchable Longing For...
…home.
You feel lost.
A nagging incoherence.
You might have been thrown under a bus.
Things never seem to fully resolve.
You don’t know who to trust.
The people you thought were safe, maybe aren’t.
The world doesn’t fit into tidy categories.
The people you thought were un-safe turn out to be amazing.
You don’t know who you can talk to about it.
That book you weren’t supposed to read was mind-blowing.
The world doesn’t fit into tidy categories.
Maybe that’s ok?
You still feel lost.
An unquenchable longing for something.
The feeling that everything is going to be ok.
You want to go home.
Where is that?
All I Want Is Home is a song about all of that.
This is the third time I’ve written this email. Not the third draft, the third full rewrite. In each earlier attempt, I’ve over-explained this song when it’s really about a feeling. So, this time I’m keeping it simple. This song is about that feeling you get when you simultaneously notice the world is not right, you desperately want it to be, and you feel utterly powerless to make it so. It’s overwhelming. The thing you want the most can’t be accessed from here, yet it’s tangible, real, and physical. But you can’t break through.
Do you ever wonder where your longing for the world to be right comes from? Isn’t it curious? I mean, empirically…this world is chaos. If we know anything, it’s that the only constant is entropy. Yet humans have this ability to consistently turn chaos into hope. It’s actually pretty astounding. And even further, it’s not so much that we long for order out of chaos, it’s that we have this innate sense that that longing is good.
So the song is about the longing. The exasperation of the chaos, and somehow finding the strength to decide to hold onto hope. Home, in this sense, is the ultimate fulfillment of hope.
All the Details
All I Want Is Home will be available on all streaming platforms this Friday, June 4th. It’s the first of three singles off my upcoming full-length album Halflight which comes out on Friday, August 6th.
You made it to the bottom. Here’s how to listen to the song today.
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All I Want Is Home is available at Bandcamp right now! |
I want to say thank you for hanging in there with me. My relationship with music has never been straight forward or simple. Which means if you’ve followed my music over the years, our relationship has been inconsistent at best. But here were are 10 years and a few emails after the last album. I’m grateful you’re still interested in what I’m doing and as a token of my gratitude All I Want Is Home is waiting for you at Bandcamp right now. Everybody else has to wait until Friday. :)
Give it a listen. Let me know how the song feels to you. Your replies to the other emails have been wonderful! It’s been great to connect. It was fun to chat about long distance trail running with Lucas and I was shocked to learn that there’s a place in South Australia called Sturt Gorge that was carved by glaciers. Glaciers! In Australia! Thanks for that one Andrew.
With love,
Joe
P.s. Bandcamp is rad. Stream the song all you want. Or purchase it for $1. Or if you are feeling super generous and want to help fund some of the more expensive things coming up (like vinyl), Bandcamp makes it so you can name your own price. You could drop $100 or $1000 if you felt so inclined.