With some songs, it’s the melody that gets lodged in your brain. It’s a guitar lick, a little line on the piano, or the catch “na-na-na” of a chorus.
But the part of “All The While” by Barzin that has been running laps in my mind for weeks isn’t a melody, but a lyric – “All the while you wait for your heart to wake up.” Something about that simple sentence really grabbed me, and got me thinking.
This is what it got me thinking: Longing is overrated.
I realize that a large percentage of modern music was written by people whose main motivation was longing for something; longing for the person you let walk away…longing for the childhood you can’t get back…the future you’re worried you won’t be able to live up to…
…but after a certain point, longing stops being romantic. There’s nothing exciting about unrequited love. So you sat there and watched her walk away. How is that romantic? You can’t wait around for things to happen. You have to jump in. Nothing is more romantic than risk.
And that’s what I take from that sentence: All the while you wait for your heart to wake up. I have no idea if Barzin meant it this way, but I hear him saying that if you spend all your time longing for something, your heart might never wake up.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The opening guitar, delicate and finger-picked.
2. The strings that join in at the first chorus. Nothing fancy, just filling out the sound.
3. The backup vocals on that key phrase in the chorus. So quiet you can barely hear them.
Recommended listening activity:
Replacing your list of things that could have been with a list of things that are.