In a previous post I gave some explanation of the book and the ambiguity of songs - What is All my Ghosts? As much as the same song can mean different things to different people at the same time, our own relationship with a song can change over time, often through life events.
This has happened with one song in particular on the All my Ghosts album - Until Tomorrow.
For all I espouse about not playing other artists songs (this is about lack of patience to learn) I should really say I don't do covers, because Until Tomorrow wasn't written by me. This is a song written by my good friend Adrian, who sent me some lyrics once and asked if I could make something of them.
Now, I couldn't tell you at that point exactly what it meant to Adrian, but I could understand it was about the pain of loss, of grief and that internal struggle when something effects us deeply in our personal life. I could sympathise with that when I was putting the chords together, and tried to evoke that sense of feeling when I was singing it.
Although I only recorded that song for the album little more than a year ago, I think it dates back 4 years or so, when the lyrics first landed in my inbox. It's also a little more than a year ago that my mother passed away, which gave rise to such a tremendous sense of loss and grief that even now I can't put into words.
That loss, which I'm not going to dwell on here, completely changed my own feelings toward
Until Tomorrow. Sympathy morphed into empathy, the idea of loss now a reality. I've only recently started practicing playing the song again in the last few weeks, playing it publicly for the first time again just a few nights ago - you can see that performance in the video here.
Playing it live wasn't actually that difficult, but playing it live made it speak to me in a different way than it had in previous performances. It felt completely relevant.
Where I initially put those words to music as a favour for a friend, I'm living in a changed world now, one that will never be the same. I'll be forever grateful now, not only that the song exists, but that I'm able to sing and perform it.
Songs will always mean something slightly different based on our individual experiences, but it's songs like this which also bring us closer together as human beings. Through shared experiences and our own stories, the ambiguity of a songs meaning can be eroded a great deal. This is just one example.
Kommentare