Not sure if this was the best song to kick off my Friday, but my goodness did it make me feel a whole lot of things…
Hayes Carll has a record coming out at the end of this month titled You Get It All and from what we’ve heard so far, we’re in for a real treat.
Last week he and Brandy Clark teamed up for a heartbreaker with “In The Mean Time.”
And this week he goes down a different path to hit your soul.
“Help Me Remember” takes you inside the mind of a man with dementia. While he still has words and awareness, his memories are all but gone.
When his wife walks in the room, he doesn’t recognize her at first, but once he does he starts asking her a whole bunch of questions about his life, and what he did, and what he stood for.
“This ring on my finger is faded, golden and warm
Like it was forged in the fires of love and weathered the storms
I try to make sense of these old photographs on the wall
But they’re just faces and places that I don’t know at all”
The song was written about his grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimer’s later in his life. He opened up about how that changed him and how he came to realize we all need a witness for our lives, especially toward the end.
“I was fourteen-years-old and sitting in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s truck in Waco, TX, the town he had lived in for most of his life, when he turned to me at a stoplight and asked where we were.
He looked scared. I know I was. I’ve thought a lot since then about what it must feel like to lose the thread of your own story.”
I mean, I was not expecting it and caught this one fully on the chin. Maybe I thought it would be a couple falling out of love and one asking the other to help them remember the good times, I don’t know, but this…
Just listen to it yourself, it’s a good one.
Super excited for this project.
