March 2019: third song off "Calendar".
Artwork by Eli Wengrin
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On my 23rd birthday, Luca composed a 5 song suite titled “23" as a present to me. I cried like a baby. It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me and I felt very loved. Since then I’ve been inspired to write a few songs as gifts for other people. I’m constantly learning more about songwriting, living, and loving from Luca and all the other wonderful people around me.

A year later, on my 24th birthday, Luca wrote me another song, “Young.” I cried again the first time I listened to the song, but the emotions still felt less visceral than they did the year before. Sometimes I feel that with each passing year I lose feeling, I feel that my actions and my experiences are less formative. Then I listened again, and paid closer attention to the lyrics: Luca was talking about May 2014, when we were recording our first EP together. “We were so young, let’s go back to the start.” The sentiment of the song perfectly reflected my own desire to feel vulnerable and emotional.

As we grow as people and as musicians, it is easy to sometimes take ourselves too seriously. But it’s much easier to find joy when we don’t have a false sense of self-importance. The song “Young” is partly about wanting to go back to the early stages of making music, ignoring production details and focusing on the fun aspects of music creation. The song has a driving energy and fun melody that inspire a certain joy, but I think the song's best quality is its function as a lived example of what it advocates. The production is rough: the guitars are jangly, the vocals unpolished, the drums booming. All of this works together as a reflection of the blissful ignorance of youth, a simpler time when we weren’t necessarily making music for any audience.

The responsibilities of life stack up. There are always more things to keep track of and more tasks to complete. But if we prioritize our time and our lives, there will also always be some time left over for us to be Young.