This song is mostly based on a conversation I had with my grandfather (Art Church Sr.) when I was in my mid-twenties. I was going through a rough patch. I found myself waking up most mornings, flooded with negative thoughts, which were paralyzing, depressing, and which set the tone of my days with a feeling of hopelessness. During one of our long rambling talks, I was able to confide in my grandfather about what I was going through.

He listened, and then told me that he’d dealt with the same thing, on and off, his whole life. He said that although he never stopped having the experience, he’d learned that if he could make himself get out of bed at the first sign of trouble, he could often get in front of the problem. For him, lying in bed wasn’t a good venue for self-reflection. It physically made him feel helpless and left him unable to sort through and deal with his thoughts. The act of getting up seemed to empower him enough to cope most days. I believe the way he summed it up was something like “At the first sign of trouble, I drag my ass out of bed, and make friends with the day”.

Although it might seem like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” solution for what is a very nuanced problem, sometimes the best solutions are simpler than we imagine. In any case, his lesson has served me well over the years, and also made me think about some of the emotional legacies that get passed along in families.