Hello and welcome to the third entry of our Moon blogs! We will be sharing our second track on our Moon album with you.
Before we talk about the lyrics, let’s talk about the instrumentation. It’s pretty similar to “Hollow I Was” but we added a cello, played by Torin Wright. It was beautiful work by Torin, we’re so thankful to have him on this track. On to the lyrics and how it was written.
I started writing Give Me Dreams in June of 2017. A lot of times I'll sing over the guitar parts until something sticks.
"There was a noise in the back room, I couldn't tell if it was you."
When I write lyrics, I go by feel. I don’t always know what they mean but I’ll keep singing it as long as it feels right. I don’t have a specific memory or reference for this line but it seems to speak to me depending on what I’m going through at the time. I believe we all have hopes of seeing certain loved ones again and it’s especially interesting when a creak in the floorboard makes you think of them.
"Maybe you came home early, maybe the same thing is haunting you."
This line references shared dreams. It seems people go in and out of certain paths and the going out is necessary for the coming back in, like waves. It's tough to know when we or other people will return to certain things but it’s usually our gut feeling that brings us back.
We went a little bit out of order because those were the first lines written, but I’ll now go to the first verse.
"I looked all night for my love. When it wasn't there I was scared."
These first two lines bring up the nature of love and friendship. While I believe love and friendship are constant in all of our lives, it has been important for me to realize the ebb and flow of both. As Alan Watts explains, every wave has a crest and a trough. The low and high points are what makes the whole thing a wave. The absence and presence of love is what makes it true love. To be a bit more specific, “I looked all night for my love” does not refer to a romantic connection for me personally. This line for me is my searching within myself for the virtue of love. It is a scary and real thing to think about when you feel that you are incapable of love. Something that consistently snaps me out of this scary thought is being out in nature. So after the instrumental break, this line acts as a response or progression.
“But step outside in the daytime, feel your body turn itself, watch the sky as it moves, a constant world to step into.”
I love being in the ocean and up in the mountains. These places calm my thoughts and teach me to slow down and realize the beauty of breathing and connection. They help me see the infinite nature of myself and the world I live in. While it can be overwhelming at times, it usually acts as a healthy distraction from whatever it is that’s stressing me out.
The last section of the song has an interesting origin. I remember the band coming in for practice and I had the riff and the chords for the end. While they were in the room i played the first chord of the outro and went "Ha!" And asked them, is that cool? We all tried it together and we just kept playing until we sang the lyrics “it’s alright, it’s alright to stay here, we come alive ,come alive in this fear”. This lyric comes from our fear or discomfort of being afraid. We often times do anything to get out of the situation that’s causing us fear. In this song, we sing about coming alive in our fear. Fear, in this case, can be seen as recognizing how passionate we are about something. I run sound on occasion and nervous singers about to play used to make me nervous. I have learned that it’s usually the nervous ones that really care about what their doing and because of that, tend to be more prepared and sound better for it!
For us, our dream is to play in beautiful places where people can process their fears and make their dreams a reality. By reading this blog, you help our dreams come true. So thank you, I know it’s work but it’s worth it.