This song began on February 2, 2025, the second day of FAWM – February Album Writing Month, a worldwide challenge to write a song every other day totaling fourteen songs by the end of the month. I had just rediscovered fawm.org when signing up and found that I already had an account from 2015. Here I was nearly ten years later attempting it for the first time.
I was traveling by van in Tasmania. I drove out to stay the night near a small town called Evandale, where I was going to meet an artist named Kier Stevens for an interview the next morning. I found a lot near a small river where people camp their RVs overnight. I got there, walked my things out to a little gazebo and made myself a camp meal – lentils, rice and tuna, pretty standard camp cooking throughout my time in Tassie. Afterwards I took a seat at the edge of the gazebo facing out towards the road, played guitar on my camp chair and watched the sunset. The melodies and words came all at once. By the time the sun went down I had worked out the changes, melodies and most of the words.
The next day I did the interview with Kier in the park. On the fourth I recorded the original demo – I was staying with my good friend Josh, who rented a room with two beds at a little bed and breakfast up in Ulverstone on the north coast of Tassie. While he was off working during the day I set up and recorded the demo in the room, playing his 1950s jazz guitar and trying not to sing too loudly.
Original Demo:
The most recent demo came at the end of that visit, already into March. The bones are from the original but if you listen to them back to back you’ll hear some differences – new layers, new vocal takes, guitars, programmed parts, percussion, drums, synthesizers. Most of what came after the Ulverstone recording was done in the van, most of it in one very cold night where I felt a massive burst of inspiration and stayed up till the sun came up just working on this tune. It was too cold to play guitar so any ideas that came into my head I would program with the keyboard on my laptop. By the time I was done, the sun had risen so ferociously hot that I couldn’t sleep! That was rough on the body. The most recent mix was done on the plane flying over the Pacific in the middle of March on my way back to the US.
I wasn’t able to balance the FAWM challenge with traveling, living out of the van, doing interviews and gigs and other recordings. All in all I think I only wrote three songs that month. This was the first and the best of them.
The song is about something I was feeling at the time – that I needed to get more into my body. It’s been a lifelong pattern for me to spend so much of my time either focused on external activities and pursuits or otherwise internal. I am a very mental person. I spend a lot of time in my thoughts. At times I feel like my body just hangs from my head. I take care of it with basic maintenance, I try to eat well and sleep when I can, but the serious thoughtful intention I put into my body is a fraction of what I put into my thoughts, my creative pursuits, my skills, my travels, my studies, my people and so on.
A more specific realization at the time of writing this song was that I was coming out of a period of maybe five or six months where I was deeply concerned with mortality – exploring the philosophy around death. I read several books, listened to hours of lectures, interviews and podcasts, and wrote about half a dozen songs concerning death and mortality in one way or another. These thoughts go in waves for me, something that has come and gone since I was a child, but this was a particularly deep and productive time. I feel I managed to move the ball forward. I was sitting quite comfortably with the topic by the end of it.
But the thing I felt most strongly by the end of it all was simply this: I possess the antidote to any concern, any worry, any fear around death. I am alive. I have a body. I am a body. All that rumination, as useful as it may be for writing songs and gaining perspective, is not really all that productive in itself. What if every hour I’ve ever spent worrying about death had been spent instead just focusing on what I can sense, on being truly alive, engaging directly with life in a visceral way, using all of me and not just the words sounding silently in my head.
I believe my death does not concern me. The only thing I should be concerned with is life. And so this song is a manifesto, a meditation, a reminder – to be present, to seek presence and stay present, to seek comfort and fullness within the body as it is. Not to get too carried away with the external or the internal dialogue.
It’s been a year since I wrote this. I’m still largely concerned with the externals and the world of my thoughts. But I have felt much more at peace within my body in the last year. I guess the declaration stuck.
“Body”
I’ve been running from the void
What did that bring?
But sickness of mind
And so much long lost time
I will ditch my bags
Try to sit still
I’m not used to being in my body
I’ll get used to it
Body heals itself
Unlike mind
Which left unchecked grows sick with time
And I got used to it
Now I want peace inside
In the body
Coming home
Take some time find peace inside
ericprincessdragon 