Wish Y’all Well

The Breakdown

I think the easiest way to explain this song is that I've reached a point where I don't want to waste much time fighting life anymore.

Not with other people.

Not with things I can't change.

And definitely not with myself.

There's a line pretty early in the song that sums up a lot of that:

“Was thinking about the print I'm gone leave and said wait.

Too bad for the wrong moves, early mistakes

I can't take 'em back, move on or split ways.”

I've done shit I'm not proud of.

I've made bad decisions, taken wrong turns and left versions of myself behind that I wouldn't want to become again.

But none of it disappears because I feel bad about it.

At some point, constantly looking backward stops being reflection and starts becoming another way of keeping yourself stuck.

I can't change the print I already left.

I can only decide what I leave from here.

And for probably the first time in my life, I actually feel like I'm doing that.

Me vs. me

That first line is probably one of the clearest descriptions of how I want to live now.

Me versus me.

Not me versus another artist.

Not me versus somebody who has more money.

Not me versus somebody who's further ahead.

And not me versus somebody from my past.

If I'm doing a little better than the version of myself from yesterday, we're moving in the right direction.

And the second line matters to me too.

My girl has been there through a lot of this. So in a song about appreciating where I am, it would've felt wrong not to acknowledge one of the people who's such a big part of why I enjoy being here.

No complicated metaphor.

She's my MVP.

That's the bar.

Some shit we never really clean up

The second verse is where the idea of really becomes less about me

and more about how I want to deal with everything around me.

I don't think peace means pretending nobody ever did anything wrong.

Some relationships end badly. Some arguments leave shit behind. Sometimes there isn't a perfect conversation ten years later where everybody apologizes, understands each other and walks away healed.

And getting sober also forced me to look at my own part in some of those messes. It's easy to remember the ways you've been hurt. It's a little harder to acknowledge the times you were the one doing the hurting.

Sometimes the mess stays a mess. You just stop living in it.

That's what Wish Y'All Well means to me.

It's more like:

I don't want anything bad for you. I just don't need to carry this anymore. You can go be happy over there. I'll be happy over here.

We're good.

The weirdest part

That contrast still fucks with me sometimes. Because when you're living through something, you don't really get to see the whole picture.

You're just in it.

And then enough years pass that you can suddenly look backward and realize how far apart two versions of the same person can be. I don't feel like I've become somebody completely different.

I'm still me.

But somehow that same person who used to live one way can now genuinely write:

I'm at peace every night. That's insane to me.

And I'm proud of it.

Bring some good shit with you

By the end of the song, I'm basically drawing a line around the life I want.

I'm not interested in spending the next part of my life surrounded by unnecessary bullshit. That doesn't mean everything needs to be positive all the time. That's not real life.

It just means I'm much more careful about what I willingly invite into mine. If you're coming with love, come through. If you're coming with bullshit...

I'm probably somewhere where the sky stays blue.

And that's really where the hook lands for me.

A new day comes. I'm good. Hopefully you're good too.

Let's keep it moving.

The funny thing is... I almost threw this song away.

Wish Y'All Well sat on my computer for months. Not because I didn't believe what I was saying.

I didn't like the hook.

I kept focusing on the production. The quality of the mix. The way the hook sounded. Whether everything felt good enough. And eventually I basically abandoned it. Then one day something clicked. The song was never the problem.

I was.

I had become so focused on making the music sound right that I completely overlooked the fact that I'd written something that genuinely resonated with my soul. That's pretty ironic when you think about it.

I wrote an entire song about accepting things for what they are... and then refused to accept the fucking song for what it was. Today, it's one of my favorite songs I've ever written. And I think that whole experience taught me something important about what I'm actually trying to do with music.

I don't make music for people who expect perfectly polished records. I'm not a mainstream artist with a giant budget and glamour surrounding every release. I'm just a dude with something authentic that I like to call art.

Sometimes it'll be polished. Sometimes it'll have rough edges. Sometimes I'll listen back six months later and hear ten things I would've done differently.

That's okay.

Because if I have to choose between something perfect and something that feels raw and undeniably real... I know which one I want to make.

Maybe that's why the outro ended up being the perfect ending without me even realizing it:

Behind Bars