Thanks for listening to Only Mystery this past week and all the sweet words you’ve sent 🖤🕊 I wrote this song at the beginning of the pandemic, in that moment when life felt unbearably fragile. There was heat burning around the fear I would lose people in my life I’d never gotten the chance to truly know. I started trying to reach out and build connections where there were none. In the Hollywood version of that story, those moments would be pivotal and affirming and tender. They would open into new closeness, and the only lingering regrets would be about how long I’d waited to try. But in reality, the trying was full of friction and misalignment. Some people are who they are and always will be, and when you aren’t close it’s for good reason. I had also just released my first album, one I’d written in a state of almost teenage euphoria about playing music with my friends. All of those songs were crafted over years of playing them live with the band I love so much, and in recording those songs and writing new ones to record along with them, I gave myself permission to craft songs with the live context in mind. I wanted them full and lush, intentionally dependent on other people. And then (sweet irony!) I released them into a world in which I had to perform them alone. I was doing live streams by myself in my bedroom, singing into a tiny camera on a tiny device, feeling these songs stripped of all the intention I’d invested in them. Half the record I just refused to play because it wouldn’t translate. I started to miss when it had just been me and a guitar and I felt powerful in that simplicity. Maybe a bit embarrassingly, Only Mystery was born out of that sort of childish frustration. FINE, I’LL WRITE A FOLK SONG, I said. It’s strange, but some of my favorite songs I’ve written have come from this sort of tension, where the feelings in my life generally and the frustrations musically both come to a boiling point and spill over into something else in a sort of ‘fuck you’ to...myself? I’m not sure. In any case, this one will always remind me of that moment and the choice to funnel it all into something I could be surprised by. 📷 @seanniebryan