You know how I said in my first post how I’d might talk about a song, well here we go. I consider myself a musician, I love music, I studied it in college, and I play a few instruments. Am I good? That’s a matter of opinion, but I digress. Music is one of the great unifiers, its in every culture, it’s everywhere in media, and it’s in our hearts. One of the many things I love about music are the lyrics. To me it’s a gateway into the thoughts and feelings of the artists. There are two ways to “analyze” the lyrics. Artist’s intention vs listener interpretation.

There’s a song recently that’s been on my mind. It’s got great lyrics, a catchy melody, and great musicianship. The song is called “Where’d All the Time Go,” by Dr. Dog. I love the lyrics. It has a familiar structure that goes Intro-Verse-Verse-Chorus-Verse- Chorus-Outro. I’m not gonna sit here and go through everything, really it’s just about the first verse. Don’t get me wrong listen to the whole song its great, but the first verse is what has a hold on me.

Verse 1 :

Where’d all the time go?
It’s starting to fly
See how the hands go
Waving goodbye

This verse just gets me every time. I know I’m not that old (25yrs), but man these lyrics hit me and gets this visceral reaction from me. I’m sure we can all agree that there just isn’t enough time in this life. We’re here for an indeterminate amount of length, and that honestly terrifies me. So starting a song with “Where’d all the time go,” forces me to think where it actually went. I spent so much of my time on bullshit, not all of it mind you, and it’s not that I regret it or anything, cause some of it was still fun. It’s not only what I did with my time, but who I did it with. The third and fourth line ” See how the hands go, Waving Goodbye,” make me think about it further. It’s not just that there were people, who at one time, were important to me, that I don’t even talk to anymore, but also people that have passed that I will never talk to again. That saddens me, but that’s life I guess. It’s crazy to me how throughout our lives people affect us in very real ways. We get some of our personalities from them, we discover new things with them, we go through hardships with them. But then one day it all just stops. The person who at one time you would have called your best friend, becomes just another person you follow on social media. You like their posts maybe leave a comment, but are they still your friend? Can you tell what is actually going on in their lives besides what they post? It’s a reality I found myself in time and time again. It hurts to be quite frank. It hurts more when there was no huge fall-out, no big argument, it’s just a quite fade out from your life. It’ll drive you crazy cause you start to think if you did something wrong, but as you go through and replay every interaction in your head it doesn’t make any sense. I know it seems a bit overdramatic, but as someone who overthinks way too much it’s happened. I had to come to an understanding that I didn’t know I was ready for. Sometimes things just end. Good or bad, doesn’t matter. These things have to end for us to even determine if they WERE good or bad in the first place. Just a few weeks ago I looked at my high school yearbook from senior year, I read all the signatures that I got from my friends, from the people who I know I wanted to keep in my life, and today I talk to maybe 4 or 5 of them. It’s been 7 years since I saw most of them. But you know what that’s ok. Not everyone is meant to be in your life forever. I’ve come to accept that. Now it doesn’t mean that I don’t think about these people cause I often do, but rather that I’m okay with them not seeing the me that I’ve grown into. I’m also okay with not seeing who they’ve grown into. I mean I miss them don’t get me wrong, if they wanted to catch up I’d gladly take them up on that offer. I’m not gonna sit around and wait for it to happen though. If it does it does and if it doesn’t it doesn’t, either way I’ll look back and think “Where’d all the time go.”