2014
I Ain't Ready
A plainspoken song about the approach of autumn as a metaphor for everything unfinished. The refrain softens its declaration into something closer to an admission.
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Songs Tagged: philosophical
32 songs
2010
Hour of the Wolf
A reflective love song that looks back on intimacy through images of mirrors, glass, and fracture. It carries the ache of hindsight, as though understanding has arrived only after the damage was done.
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2010
The Turning
A reflective song about sensing change before anyone can name it. It asks whether history is turning, whether a reckoning is coming, and whether we are capable of recognizing it while still inside it.
Found On These Albums
March 24, 2019
Persephone Unbound
A spring song of thaw and return, naming the season through images of water, birds, and first growth. The mythic frame gives its tenderness extra resonance.
Rough Working Demo
2017
No There There
A ballad about a relationship that almost became something real and never quite did. It borrows a famous phrase to describe an intimacy that never found solid ground.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Home Again
A searching ballad about a long road traveled and a mountain that's always there in the mind. The lyric doesn't sentimentalize — "broken people, bodies, hearts and minds" is in there — but it finds a resting...
Rough Working Demo
September 9, 2018
I'm Alive
A plainspoken song that catalogs the moments, sights, and seasons that make being alive feel undeniable. It finds meaning in attention rather than proclamation.
Rough Working Demo
2018
Ephemera
A philosophical reflective song about impermanence. The verses invite presence and then withdraw the ground: the warmth between us will grow cold, this momentary flash, the sound will fade. The bridge...
Found On This Album
2015
Over and Out
A song built from directional opposites — in and out, over and under, up and down — until all that movement circles back to defeat. Its plain language gives the pattern real weight.
Rough Working Demo
2014
Land of Nod
A humorous blues song whose Biblical setup gives the deadpan that follows a slightly off-kilter frame. Its charm comes from how comfortably it balances wit with real feeling.
Found On This Album
2015
Hegel Revisited
A searching ballad that uses dialectic as a way of thinking about conflict, from the intimate to the historical. What keeps it human is the sense that every grand argument still lands in lived experience.
Rough Working Demo
2014
Urizen Awake
A philosophical piece built on a complex instrumental architecture ), which is unusual enough to shape the whole sonic character. The title references William Blake's personification of cold reason, and the...
Rough Working Demo
2011
I Want You to Groove
A generous, open-hearted invitation to hear the world differently and come along for the ride. More than a seduction, it's a song about wanting to share a state of feeling, rhythm, and attention.
Found On This Album
December 23, 2024
Edge of Night
A haunted breakup song that drifts from private hurt into a larger question about whether real feeling ever held. Its images of empty halls, cobwebs, and lingering debris give it the feel of grief after the...
January 19, 2024
Waterfall
A love song The verses move between intimate physical detail and a philosophical claim: the universe becomes aware through us, and we belong at home in that awareness. The instrumental bridge repeats twice...
Rough Working Demo
November 9, 2023
Love is What Love Survives
A song of love as ordeal, residue, and persistence. Rather than praising romance in easy terms, it treats love as something that burns, wounds, and endures — what remains after illusion and heat have passed.
Rough Working Demo
November 21, 2021
The Jay
A window-side meditation on a blue jay and the mystery of awareness itself. The bird becomes a way of asking what, exactly, is seeing and being seen.
2016
Wish I Could
A folk-blues built on a single repeated wish that changes from verse to verse: lay down this load, walk the golden road, see the emerald valley, hear the silver bell toll. Five verses, one song.
Rough Working Demo
February 15, 2020
One Bite of Crazy
A song about the overwhelming scale of what has to be fixed, and the only available strategy: one piece at a time. Three chords, economical.
Rough Working Demo
September 30, 2018
Sands of Time
A folk song about time running out on a relationship and maybe on other things. The central image — each step dropping a grain into the sands of time — holds the verses together loosely, and the refrain asks...
Rough Working Demo
June 8, 2018
Never Give it Up
A motivational song that keeps its message as plain as possible: hold on to what matters and do not surrender it. The directness is the point.
Rough Working Demo
2017
Timeline
A philosophical song about history, fate, and the possibility that meaning appears only in passing. It questions everything while still listening for a voice in the noise.
Rough Working Demo
2016
Bump and Scrape
A philosophical song, about the sparks and friction of human experience. The first verse is physical, the second cosmic, the third reflective. The bridge is instrumental. The closing verse is the most honest:...
Rough Working Demo
January 14, 2021
Sandman
A philosophical song, built on a three-against-four rhythmic feel. The "sandman" is the false comfort of simple answers, and the bridge makes the counter-observation: "streaked with beauty, it reeks of...
2015
Glimpse of Freedom
A searching song about seeing freedom in the animals — chickens scratching, sheep behind wire, dogs in the sun — and finding the comparison disquieting. The bridge redefines freedom as not just taking what...
1980
God Can Only Love and Grieve
One of the earliest songs in the catalog, this is a rain-soaked meditation on longing, sorrow, and the uneasy feeling of being joined to something larger than oneself. Its language moves between intimacy and...
1981
Sufi Poem
One of the oldest pieces in the catalog. The lyrics are a translation of a poem by the ninth-century Sufi mystic Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, set to original music.
Rough Working Demo
March 1, 2024
Doesn't Your God Wonder
A song built as a direct challenge to divine certainty. The verses catalog specific Biblical incidents — the flood, bears sent to kill children, the Incarnation — with the plainness of someone reading a...
February 10, 2019
Reflection
A searching, introspective song about the divided self and the feeling of being watched from within. It moves from ordinary awareness into something more mysterious, then turns toward love, where the question...
2007
When
A searching song about belief, denial, and the stories people tell themselves to avoid what is in front of them. Rather than preaching, it keeps circling the same hard question until it becomes the song's...
Rough Working Demo
1980
Too Late
An early apocalyptic lament that faces loss without softening it. The song piles up its reckonings one after another, but beneath the severity a human voice insists that what has happened must be named.
2011
Hey Jesus, What the Fuck?
A blunt protest song aimed at violence done in the name of faith. Its anger is public rather than private, turning outrage into a rough, unvarnished chorus that refuses consolation.