Caving In
“Sometimes the minutes feel like walls, and they’re caving in on me. The hours act like birds, and fly for the palm trees.”
Squished by Space-Time
We got a lot of snow this past winter. A lot of snow. It was that thing where the curbs in residential neighborhoods would already have piles of hardened snow two feet tall, and then the forecast calls for another few inches. So, the snow plows come again and push the new snow against these curb-piles, creating mega-curb-piles that encroach upon the street more and more. Now your two lane residential street is an advanced level driving simulation where you’re dodging parked cars, snow piles, and oncoming vehicles, all atop an ice rink surface. Best of luck to you if you are driving a Dodge Grand Caravan like me.
It provokes a feeling of not having enough space. Not enough elbow room. The feeling that the walls are inching closer and closer toward you every time you blink.
“Lose a driving lane and gain an hour on this afternoon commute.”
Space and time are connected. Albert Einstein can tell you all about it, or can you can feel it for yourself when you are in the pickup lane at the neighborhood elementary and middle schools after a big snowfall. The mega-snow-piles create less space on the road, which causes more traffic jams, which create less time for you to catch your breath between getting home from school pickup and making dinner. At the risk of sounding like a trope who got a C in high school Physics (I’m not sure if I actually did, but I should have… I didn’t understand a lick of it), the type of space-time connection I can actually understand is the kind I can feel.
Cultivate Sanity
“Add four more things to the calendar, this week will be madness. Five months til it settles down, I have my doubts about the process.”
Out of these ahhhh-I’m-being-squished feelings was born the song, “Caving In”. When you’re feeling existentially squished, sometimes a creative outlet is exactly what you need. Describing how I felt, and writing those feelings into a song helped me to feel a little more sane.
Speaking of sanity, there is another type of caving in that inspired this song: binary thinking. This or that. Black or white. I see it in political ideologies, theological frameworks, and general attitudes that people hold. There is so much chatter in the world, so many opinions, so much noise; there can be a lack of nuance, or a lack of humility in how we hold our opinions. I know that I sound like I’m on a soap box, and I won’t deny that I am. However, I also won’t deny that I can fall into this way of thinking as well. It’s hard to dig into deep, critical thinking, when the air is filled with so much chatter. Sometimes it feels like walls of ideology are caving in on me.
“Open space is filled with closed minds and a pair of absolutes.”
Concept Album?
After I spent some time writing “Caving In”, I had a few missing gaps in the lyrics, and I needed some new inspiration to help me fill them in. The thing that kept popping up in my head is, the sky is falling, the sky is falling!, so I turned to the folktale, “Henny Penny”. A phrase that the folktale frequently repeats is, “they went along and they went along”, and I used a variation of this in the first verse on “Caving In”. “Henny Penny” served me well to finish this song, but I also sensed that it had more to offer. There are more themes to be explored in it - themes that feel pertinent to 2024.
“Threadbare and spread too thin.”
As it happens, I had been talking to my dear friend, Sarah Vanderpool, and she was telling me about the thought process she and her husband had in writing The Well Pennies’ album, Endlings, and how each song of the album is based on a different thing they didn’t want to come to an end. Before this conversation, I didn’t even know what an “endling” was (it’s the final survivor of an extinct species - the last one of its kind to die). I loved hearing her talk about how the concept for the album shaped how they wrote each song, and I thought this could be fun way to explore all these “Henny Penny” themes.
When I mentioned my budding “Henny Penny” concept album idea to Sarah, she responded with, “what a coincidence - I just watched an episode of Golden Girls last night that was all about “Henny Penny”!” One might write that off as insignificant, but that same day, I told my friend, Chelsie, about the idea, and she responded immediately with, “what a coincidence - my son just brought home a book from the school library yesterday - and it was “Henny Penny”!”. And lest you accuse me of reading too much into things, let me tell you a third story (for by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word shall be established). That following morning, The Atlantic posted an article by David Brooks, entitled “Chicken Littles Are Ruining America”. Our family has a connection to David Brooks, because his wife is the editer-in-chief of Comment Magazine (where Matt works, and for whom I produce two podcasts), so we always pay attention to his pieces. Apparently David Brooks also sees the connection between the themes of this folktale and this current moment in time. (Please note that “Chicken Little” is the American adaptation of “Henny Penny”.)
I heard the divine proclamation loud and clear: God wanted me to make an album based on the folktale “Henny Penny”. And so I did.
Stay tuned for more blog posts about each of the other songs on “Henny Penny”, and listen to the album wherever you stream music while you wait!
Listen Now
Miscellany
Miscellaneous things I want you to notice about “Caving In”:
The lyrics of the choruses use opposites as word play. “Lose a driving lane and gain an hour…”, “…I’m in purgatory and I’m bingeing on…”, “Open space is filled with closed minds”, “…hard to keep a forward movement with a backlog of tasks…”
The second verse does some simple counting. “Two words into a sentence… three thoughts I want to share… add four more things to the calendar… five months til it settles down”.
The timeline of the release of the album was largely determined by that line, “five months til it settles down”. One huge theme of “Henny Penny” is the concept of doomsdayism, and what is more doomsday-y in America than a presidential election year? Especially this year, my goodness. So, 1) I wanted to release this album in 2024 because 2024 is extra the-sky-is-falling-y, and 2) with a lyric like “five months til it settles down”, I figured, if I can, I might as well release this album about five-ish months before the election.