08 Wrong Day

A reflection on the eighth song off of 'Make It All Feel Real'

In ‘Wrong Day’, the main character finds himself trying to uplift his guardian angel, who tends to add to her memoir when she is sad. He pledges to be the comic relief, the lighthearted character that will make her forget her chronic pain; her sadness. He urges her not to be sad on any day where the sun rises. In the second verse, the main character notices this vicious cycle that his angel is becoming trapped in, searching deep within herself to find the root of her own problem, while at the same time driving herself mad, slowly forgetting that the problem that she is facing is not her.

“Darkness has a voice, but it comes in peace.” I’ve had this line for a very long time but never knew how I wanted to create the context around it. I decided to turn it into a way of conveying that we must attempt to recognize our problems and remember that we are not them, and our problems are not us. In meditation that I use often when dealing with anxiety, I put my judgement, my bias, all of my reactions aside as best I can while I return to my senses, being aware of the feelings in my body, the sounds and the smells, and not reacting to them, constantly focusing attention on these senses and trying to deter myself from any thought. I would become more aware of my true self, and as a result, decipher which thoughts were rational and which thoughts were not. These irrational thoughts stem from darkness, a lesser know place within my mind, a place that fills me with fear, that I don’t have a lot of control over. Though I am afraid of it, I am happy that my issues have made themselves known so I was able to address it. Unfortunately, as problems grow, some of us have less of a chance of becoming aware of them and I think that our problems have the ability to truly overtake us.

At the end of the song, in a flooded basement on a rainy night, the guardian angel tells the main character that he no longer needs her help no more, he has everything. She disappears into a vortex of water, leaving the main character to figure out how to continue on on his own.

It’s super tough trying to provide enough context to tell a story through an album. I felt that the lyrics required some reflection as a companion to clarify things when I ran out of space in the album for more lyrics. The main character has learned some really important lessons so far, in companionship, in trust, in spirituality, in perseverance, in confidence, and in duty. This album is partly about learning how to learn, and how to respect and honor morals; I think the guardian angel becomes sad because the main character wasn’t able to learn this lesson within himself on his own; it took seeing this problem from an outside perspective for him to be able to know that it may exist within himself as well. A lot of religions look at life as a test. Though I think this is true, I think we all have different tests; different capabilities in understanding and interpreting different lessons, and I think it is a duty to share these lessons in order to help each other become the best that we can be; one spirit.