August

Alright y'all. The new song is here. The new video is here. Charting a Course - Recorded at Atlantic Studios (That's Atlantic Records. Yup. I know. Wild.)
Listen HERE: tr.ee/mxGtA4Jvxs Watch HERE: youtu.be/zrIauDgG_tE?si=d8eGfvOXEMDK2gfi
(Apologies, for some reason it's not letting me hyperlink but you get the idea.)

This song has been floating around in my brain since, I think around 2020. I'd have to go back and dig through pages and pages of notebooks on top of notebooks (literally on top of each other, they're stacked all over my different bookshelves and in desk drawers) to find the original lyrics. I didn't touch it for a really long time. It was one of those I wrote and then left alone and returned to one day thinking, "Why did I ever put this one down?"

The album I released last year and this song were all written within a few years of each other, around 2020 - 2023. I had always imagined this song would end up on the album with all the others, released as one big piece of my life, but then the Atlantic Records thing happened and this one didn't feel right to put on the album anymore. Plus, like, how cool is it to release a single recorded at Atlantic Records? Pretty cool, I think. And I've loved hearing what people think of this song.

I had someone ask me what this song is about. I find most of my lyrics are really definitive ie, "Last time I saw you you asked me if that song was about you I regret that I said nothing but in the moment it's so hard to just say yes" or "I love you in a way I've never loved nobody else" or "I know the girl across the street was the one who came before me." Non-sensical, just saying exactly what's happening in the moment. Doesn't leave much to the imagination. But after I was asked this, I started thinking, huh. This is a little more poetic than I usually get. So I thought maybe I'd break it down a bit.

"Charting a course with no need to be charted"
In other words, we're trying to define something that doesn't need to be defined. We're trying to put a label to something that doesn't need one. We're looking for more meaning when sometimes it all just...is. Or, my personal favorite, we're turning over tables and burning down cities (metaphorically or otherwise) to fight a fight that doesn't need to be fought, against others or ourselves. This meaning changes for me depending on the day I'm singing it and what's happening in my life at that current moment. The last line of the chorus is:

"We're living in the pain of our broken hearts when the love that we needed was there all along"
This might be some of my favorite lyrics I have ever written. I don't know if you'll relate to this, but I've spent so much time living in and from that broken heart space. Thinking I need fixing, thinking I need to feel only good, all the time, when really I just need to be living from what's behind that. Which is just love. If we all moved from that tender space, I think life might be a little easier across the board. But it's hard. If it was easy everyone would do it. So this song serves as a reminder to me to keep living from that space instead of the space that seems easier in the moment. I remember listening to an interview with The Avett Brothers and they were talking about writing a song from the perspective of the person you want to be, or the place you want to be. And that's this song for me. I don't always live from the places I sing about in this song. But oof, I really want to. Which gets me to the last verse.

"As your day ends, oh another's beginning / As you fold your hands and look up to the sky
You think of how grateful you are just to be here / And how without darkness you wouldn't know light"
The last few years have been a doozy for me. As they have been for all of us. I've been going through major physical and emotional upheavals and trying to stay present through all of that is so incredibly difficult. Disassociating and turning off your brain is so much easier than feeling what you need to feel to get to the other side. There is a time for doing that to be able to survive. I know it. You can't feel everything all at once (you'd implode) but it can happen in bits and pieces and in safe spaces. I wrote this verse long before I was on the side of being grateful. I was singing this song in the midst of some really tough shit (for lack of a better phrase) and sometimes I'd sing it and feel like a fraud. But that's what practicing gratitude is, I think. It's a fake it 'til you make it kind of thing. You put on the face and you say, "Today, I'm grateful for a, b, and c" without acknowledging that you know, the world is on fire. You have to WORK for positivity, you have to create joy or you will get sucked into the void. So even if I sang this a million times and never meant it, I do now. Everytime I get to this verse during a show, I drop right into my body and look up at the sky I'm under and think, "Wow. I made it. I'm here. That's pretty darn amazing in light of all that has happened." I've become grateful because I sang it into existence. I practiced it and I can see it now.

I think, to sum up in one thought what this song is, it's really letting go. I can say so many words about all of this and break it down line by line and tell you what the personal piece is behind each one, but it would always come back to that. Letting go. 

I hope you can listen to this song and feel what I feel and come around to the other side of something you've been holding too tightly. I'm telling you now, it's easier to let it go.

All my love,
​Angelina <3