The story behind the song
Starting from damage
Most love songs start with falling. This one starts with surviving.
I wanted to write about two people who found each other on the other side of damage. Both of them had been in relationships that left marks. Both of them had learned to make themselves smaller, quieter, more careful. And then they looked up one day and saw each other, really saw each other, and everything started to shift.
The song opens with armour: “I used to wear my silence like armour / Kept every tender part locked away.” That is where both characters begin. Not broken, exactly, but braced. Waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
The kintsugi idea
There is a Japanese concept I kept coming back to while writing this. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The idea that the cracks are part of the beauty, not something to hide.
“Through every crack, your love found its way in / Now we’re whole in ways we’ve never been.”
That line captures it. You do not heal by pretending the damage was not there. You heal when someone comes along and treats your cracks as the most interesting thing about you.
What changed for both of them
The song trades between two perspectives. She was armoured and closed off. He was sinking, slowly suffocating in stillness. They each had walls built from different materials, but the effect was the same.
What changed for both of them was being seen. Not performed for. Not managed or placated. Just seen.
“You do not flinch when I show you my scars / You do not ask me to hide who I’ve been.”
That is the turning point. Not grand gestures. Just someone who does not look away.
What it sounds like
We moved through several musical directions with this one before landing on a clean modern folk sound. The Lumineers meets The Civil Wars. Lively and emotional, building from something intimate to something genuinely anthemic.
The Zulu harmonies I originally envisioned did not translate the way I hoped in production. Removing them actually made the song stronger. Sometimes less is the most honest choice.
Listen to “Easy as spring” from the album In the fog.
