About the Song “Wars Begun” — Track 6 from Begin Again

To the casual observer who maybe knows me a bit and knows about my past, a quick glance through these writeups and the liner notes may make it seem as if this record is living in the past… perhaps I carry the past with me more than many people do, and certainly I have tried to maintain relationships with people from various stages of my life, but I try not to live in the past. When people in my hometown celebrated the music scene I was a part of, I felt some pride I guess more for my friends who were involved in presenting that than necessarily for my part in it, but I was glad they did it and that people cared. Finishing these songs, some of them after many years, has been more about trying to build a more meaningful relationship with who I was as a younger man, learning from him while trying to step into a new chapter of my life as an adult. I'm not nostalgic for those times -- I feel grateful and a little blessed to have lived an interesting life, and it continues to keep me on my toes – but sometimes I wonder if that younger me wasn't wiser in many ways than I am today.

This song continues to hold more mystery for me than many of the songs on this record. It is an intuitive creation built from the bones of an acoustic / synthesizer arrangement of what had been called "we do not exist" – itself surfacing as new full band arrangement on this record (Track 11 - "if we exist…"). It serves as a call/response (with Track 8 - "all this was written") prelude to that later version which is in many ways the coda to the album. My production collaborators and I titled many of these songs at the very end of the process, just before I released the album, and this was among those that were retitled. Mike Sack, my defacto producer, liked and wanted to highlight the "war just beginning" theme, and we landed on "wars begun" in some ways as a nod to the relative song "wars end," not at the time fully conscious of the connective tissue.

"Wars begun" is about a father and daughter, the father in conflict with himself about who his daughter is becoming. Like all children, she is needy for attention and wants to be a part of something larger than herself, and is trying "to speak as we." I pitched down my voice for the "she's just like her mother" and it almost eerily sounds like a younger version of my own father speaking the words. The series of scenes and images come both from my experience of starting to reparent myself following the death of my mother, in part with tools I learned from attending adult children of alcoholics meetings and studying their literature, but also from my experience of close friends with young children, their families already split by estrangement between parents, children caught in the middle as they often are – as I was.

During the recording of this record, sometime early last year or perhaps late 2023, I had recorded a very simple, stripped down version of the old relative song "Wars end" (https://lastminuterecords.com/?q=track/wars-end) so it had been on my mind, but it wasn't until this morning that I went back and revisited its lyrics, thinking about the title of this song. It seems my unconscious was at work, helping to pull this all together – the verses from "wars end":

The way God smiles And shrugs today
While eyes are hid In fear and shame

Man sits back and wonders why
His daughter smiles but cries and cries

Still we all sit and watch TV
While a child's eyes well up with need

The second part of the song begins "and the words that killed the pain they caused, pain was dressed in white and smiling a patient, caring smile. 'It's time to learn' she says, and I laugh to know I'm home again, home to see the wars end…" It was written probably in 97 or 98, when the world felt like a very different place. The idea of wars ending and the future being a place of sort of limitless hope seemed much more palpably real to me back then, before the towers fell, among other things.

The world seems more complex today, and maybe its just that I'm older, and I live in nuance and complexity much more than the idealism I lived in back then, but it often seems to me that the world is a much darker place today. However, I'm struck as I write this that there seems to be a deep and layered message of hope in the references I created here, call it by accident or "unconsciously willed." A war just beginning somewhere may forebode difficult times ahead, but as with all things, its ending must come eventually – and such endings bring both relief and opportunities for great learning and revelation (feelings and ideas I tried to capture in "wars end"). But more than the prefiguring of that ending in this song's war beginning, there is also a reminder here that in the midst of a storm, even if that war (whether it be the war of a family torn apart, an actual war with tanks and bombs, or both) should embroil much of the girl's coming of age, the man's life – what he can see is that in that moment of togetherness there is peace and safety and wholeness, calming his daughter back to sleep, he is able to let that be enough despite his knowledge of what may come.

My relationship with my own father has been difficult and distant at times throughout my life, and though there is more peace between us now, there are times that I mourn that we were never closer. Even though I have lived most of my life in the conflict of a family split apart, of a world dramatically changed by point-in-time events like the towers falling or evolutionary revolutions like the invention, commercialization, and near ruination of the Internet; today I find myself wondering if a moment like this existed between my father and I, too far in the past for my adult brain to clearly remember – a moment where he was able to comfort me and feel at peace because of it: whole and complete. That self contained moment would be a beautiful thing to be able to hang onto, I'd like to think, even if you had to spend most of your life at odds with this person that you love, as he and I ended up doing. Perhaps I'll ask him.