Verse 1 & Verse 2 Story

These verses came to me when I was in college in 1986. I remember feeling this sudden sense of fear one night while I was walking home and I couldn't tie it to anything in particular. Suddenly, my surroundings felt kind of ominous and haunted. I wasn't scared for myself in any immediate way. It was an existential dread. Then, I think it was the next day, I wrote down the first two verses along with the lines, "Whatcha gonna do when you're not so fast, Whatcha gonna do when the good life is gone."

Our band, 4 Tomorrow, played this song at campus gigs, but it never felt complete to me. The lyrics kept coming up in my mind in the following decades. I would ask myself what they meant, but every time I tried to complete the song, nothing felt right. Therefore, the song remained unfinished.

Verse 3 Story

During COVID, over 30 years after I wrote the initial lyrics, I recorded a few versions of the song. The new chorus I wrote resonated with me at first, but then after I got done recording the whole song, something in me went, "that's not right," and the whole thing stopped feeling right. However, I did write the third verse during this time and that really stuck with me.

Chorus Story

The chorus, as it is now, came to me in 2023. At this point, I had figured out the riddle. This song was always about unresolved trauma. In college, I had no clue that I had survived anything that could remotely be called trauma. However, I had this creeping, almost subconscious sense that I was running away from something invisible.

Bridge Story

I had written an earlier bridge that made everything resolve into a happy ending. It had a line like, "you my friend reached out your hand and helped me feel my feet again." When I revisited the bridge in 2024, I felt more committed to making the whole song reflect the haunting feeling that started the inspiration for it in the first place, rather than to resolve it and tie a bow on it. There was a part of me that felt guilty for writing a song without some tidy resolve on the end. My girlfriend was very helpful in encouraging me to keep the song dark.

The line "then the darkness came alive" refers to a specific time when I was working on recording an album in Hollywood and I realized that fame was not going to resolve the fear that was haunting me. In fact, it would make everything worse. This was back in 1991 when Hawk Bjorn and I were working on the album Bounce The Ocean with Steve Berlin who was, and still is, a member of the band Los Lobos. It was Super Bowl Sunday. I went to order pizza and I saw two "quick dial" buttons on the phone. One said, "hookers," and the other said, "cocaine." At the moment I saw those buttons, I stopped breathing. For the rest of the day I couldn't go back in the studio and still breathe. I spent the rest of the day outside. Steve was clear that I was having a panic attack. I thought I was going to die. Of course, Steve was right.

From that moment, I woke up with severe anxiety every morning that stayed with me until I went to sleep. I started seeing a therapist, I changed my diet, I ran several miles a day, but nothing relieved the anxiety until we were released from our record deal with Private Music over two years later in 1993. I would describe those two years as almost continuous dissociation and depersonalization. To give an example, I could carry on a conversation normally, but it didn't feel like it was me who was talking. It was more like I was observing my body talking while "I" was somewhere else entirely. The anxiety improved somewhat after I got out of the music business, but that was only the beginning of reclaiming my well-being. For many years after this, I suffered from severe depression. It was a long road home.

The End

Once I wrote the bridge in a way that resonated with my experience, I was still vexed as to what this fear was that I was describing. What exactly was I scared of? That's the thing with post-traumatic stress. It makes you think the fear is still "out there" when you're carrying it around with you the whole time. The only way to completely resolve the riddle was to identify the fear as myself.

It only took 38 years to figure it out.