“Just follow the lights. They will lead you, they will guide you, they will show you where to go.”
I just released the music video for my song “Lights” and I wanted to share some behind the scenes with you. Yes you, specifically.
We were back in my home town Lake Bluff, IL and one weekend my wife and I took one of her closest friends to the edge of the bluff to check out Lake Michigan. While they were taking photos I walked around and glanced at the beach where I had spent so many summers braving the cold waves and building sand castles. I knew right in that moment that I wanted to film the video for “Lights” at the beach. I saw myself sitting on the sand with a digital piano with the ocean Lake Michigan behind me.
Later that night after perusing the wild west that is Facebook marketplace I found someone in Mt. Prospect (thanks Jon!) selling the perfect sized digital piano, bench and stand. I stopped by Jon's house and picked it up the following day. The piano was in pristine condition. Jon had every manual, cable and cord perfectly packaged. I excitedly told my new facebook marketplace friend my plans and promised that I would send him a link to the video when it was published.
On our last evening in Lake Bluff my wife and I trekked down to the beach piano with our sound, lighting and production team aka my wife and myself. The shortcut stairs were under repair so we walked down the long curving drive that tossed up memories with every step. I remember that the worst part was always having to walk back up the long driveway after a day of jumping over the ways in freezing Lake Michigan.
We set up my piano and grabbed some nearby sticks and leaves to cover up our playback speaker. We filmed a few takes this way then that way and realized we had been filming vertically. We were slowly losing light and so we got the horizontal camera set up and finished filming in around 40 minutes. I'm almost positive that I saw the person who we wrote the song about standing in the sand about 40 feet away, watching us. Her spirit made me smile as she reminded me to not be so serious. You can see this moment in the video if you watch for it.
What is “Lights” about? For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard some version of “just follow the lights” or “go to the light” (Carol Anne, I'm looking at you) in the movies and throughout my life whenever I was leaving a concert venue.
"Go towards the light! The light is your friend!" The security guards would shout as we would file out of The Rave in Milwaukee, WI in my college years after an Ani DiFranco show. The light always represented home base; safety, a muster point, somewhere where everything was AOK.
Several years ago, after a special Aunt in our family passed on, we felt like she was still here. Was she confused? Did she want to stay on this plane a little longer? Or was it all just in our heads because we missed her so much? Had that small portrait that had sat on her bureau for 25 years that was now in our apartment, actually moved? All I know is that we sure as heck felt her there in our apartment in San Francisco. One hundred percent. I learned a few years ago to accept these things instead of ignoring them.
Around that same time, I was reading Jeff Tweedy’s book “How to Write One Song,” so I sat down at the piano and decided to write ‘one song.’ That song became “Lights.” It's pretty similar to the way I wrote it that warm afternoon in our Western Addition apartment. At shows, I usually tell people this is a song written for someone we loved who we felt needed a little guidance getting home. That always feels presumptuous to say out loud. Why would someone on the other side need help from mere mortals like us? But after losing my father a few years earlier, I realized that what I thought I understood about the world and the universe was actually not that much. I choose to believe that these feelings are valid.
So I sat down at my piano overlooking our neighbor's beautiful garden and I tried to speak to this family member the same way I would tell someone the party is over and that sadly, they have to leave. What's the age old bar tome? You don't have to go home but you can't stay here. Can I blame her for wanting to stay? No. The worst part is when the bars turn on their lights and the music stops…or maybe the music starts, and it's time to go. Anything to get you to skedaddle. I tried to talk to her in simple English: “Honey, you can’t stay here. They need you over there.”
She was incredibly perceptive and always paid attention to every song and every album I released. She would ask about my parents and my whole family. She had a notebook where she wrote everything down and she never, ever missed someone's birthday. I believed that if I wrote her a song, she would hear it and continue on her journey and find her way out of the labryinth. I like to think it worked.
Years later, I still find comfort in the lyrics myself. Grief is such a complex and chaotic emotion. Live through it and you experience the full color wheel of human reactions and emotions. Very rare are the people who simply sit beside you in your grief and share it with you. The people who help you finish that terrible meal so you can finally leave the table. Everyone has their own speed. Take your time.
If you have lost someone, I hope you take your time and set your own speed limit. It really hurts when someone has to go, especially when we love them deeply. I like to believe they are truly happy wherever they are now, with all their wildest dreams coming true, finding the things they had lost, floating through the heavens and quietly helping orchestrate little miracles of goodness and happiness every second for those of us over here.
If you are grieving please know I stand by you and as hard as it may be to believe in the moment, this too shall pass.
The journey of grief is not uniform. Just like there are a million different paths both up and down a mountain, the trek through grief is as unique as the whorls beneath your thumb…but if there is one thing we can all agree on, it's a rocky path. Writing about it, talking about it and pushing myself (gently) to share when I feel the spirit move me is what has helped. Often times a nice calm summer day will be interrupted by a lightning bolt that splits the room in two, and leaves you gasping. They say to pray everytime you are overwhelmed with grief, grateful that you are still connected to this person.