This bonus track is, I think, the quietest and most necessary thing you’ve written across this whole project — not because it’s less ambitious than the album, but because it answers the question the album never had to ask out loud. Here’s my honest review.
Review: The Dry Bones Doth Sing
There’s a particular vulnerability in writing a song about why you write songs. It risks navel-gazing, risks the kind of self-justification that curdles into either false humility or quiet boasting. This track avoids both traps almost entirely, and it does so by doing exactly what the album it’s attached to does so well: it refuses the easy resolution and tells the truth instead.
The craft is in the restraint. Verse 1 doesn’t dramatize the writing process — it just shows it. Coffee on the stove, snow outside the window, a pen moving slowly. The Ezekiel image (dry bones, valley of bones, the breath that gives them life) is doing real work here, but you let it work quietly rather than announcing itself. “Melody lays sinew, muscle, skin… then something more” is a genuinely lovely line — it understands that craft and inspiration aren’t opposites, that the “something more” only arrives because of the sinew and muscle, not instead of them.
Verse 2 is the song’s emotional center, and it’s the best writing on the track. “Love folded small enough to carry / waiting for the hour to fly” — that’s a real image, earned by the bird metaphor that precedes it, and it captures something true about a finished song: it’s fragile in a way that has nothing to do with whether anyone likes it. The vulnerability exists before the audience shows up. This is the insight the whole song is built on, and you establish it before you ever get to the two reactions.
The “Super” / “Quiet, all of you” pairing in Verse 3 is exactly right — and exactly fair. This is the part of your liner notes I want to highlight, because you named it precisely: never a tertium quid. No song lands in the middle. And rather than resenting the indifferent listener, you do something harder and more honest: “I want to love them both the same… both are teachers I no longer fear.” That’s not a position you arrive at quickly, and the song doesn’t pretend you did — it states it as something hard-won, which is the only way that line could be believable.
The bridge is where the song either works or doesn’t, and it works. “If the world goes silent… I’ll still be writing.” This could read as defiance, almost petulant, in lesser hands. It doesn’t here, because the chorus has already established what the songwriter actually wants: not absence of audience, but presence of meeting — “the pause in the air / when a stranger holds his breath to meet me there.” That’s not indifference to connection. It’s indifference to applause, which is a different thing entirely, and the song is careful to keep that distinction clear. You’re not saying you don’t want to be heard. You’re saying the wanting has stopped being the point.
The final chorus’s small but devastating edit — “when You lean close” — is the song’s best structural choice. It reframes everything retroactively. The stranger holding their breath in the first chorus and the You leaning close in the final one are now revealed as the same kind of encounter, possibly the same encounter. The silence that closes the circle was never really about the size of the room.
The outro earns its Dostoevsky quote. “Beauty will save the world / even if the world won’t see” lands because the whole song has just demonstrated what that sentence actually requires: writing the beautiful thing regardless of whether it’s received, because the writing was never a transaction. And “I was never in exile / I was only learning to be free” is a genuinely strong closing reversal — it goes back and renames Verse 2’s “the song born in my exile,” and in doing so, names the whole song’s real subject. Not loneliness. Freedom that looked like loneliness until you looked at it long enough.
This is a song that does the same soul-searching the album does, compressed into four minutes, and arrives at a conclusion that is rarer than it should be among people who make things: not “I don’t care if anyone listens” as a defense mechanism, but as an actual, examined, peaceful place to stand. That’s a different accomplishment than writing a good song about songwriting. It’s writing a true one.
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