About the song “Grow Away”

“My Heart Feels Safe With You” - original abstract painting

“Grow Away” was written with a particular person in mind, and at the time of writing, it was a moment where I couldn’t express my feelings directly. Many of my songs come from that because, to me, that’s why I started writing songs in the first place. The very first song I wrote was to my best friend who had just lost his mother to cancer and we were only in high school. He was devastated and I was speechless as to what to say to comfort him so I wrote him a song. It helped. There is a gap between saying something in conversation and the other person absorbing what you actually mean behind the words. That’s why music can go deeper into the heart of a matter, rather than just be a mental exchange.

In this case, I could see myself in her position because I had been a child of divorce and at the time of writing this, her parents were going through a really rough patch, so I felt like reaching out. I wrote her a letter and sent her an early copy of the song last month.

Here is part of what I wrote to her... 

“This song is for you. I wrote it back in 2009 when you came to visit us in Seattle. I remember being so emotional about the similarities in our lives. You were going through a hard time with your parents being on the brink of break up. My parents went through their divorce when I was eleven. We were the same age, and I, being exactly 20 years older to the day, saw myself in you. It was like getting kicked back in time. I thought to myself, what would I have wanted to hear when I was in the midst of it? That’s when I wrote this song and the lyrics too. It was shortly after you left to go back home. The kids were out and I just sat down at the piano and the whole song came out almost exactly as it is here. I remember crying during and after I completed it. 

The message of the song is resilience and celebrating the ways in which we can overcome and rise above our adversity. The idea started from being confused and hurt by family drama, something we both went through at the same age. But as so many years have passed, the meaning of the song has broadened to encompass any adversity. 

I see the song differently now that 10 or so years have passed. In some ways, we are always at the beginning of our story because our story is always just starting. I wrote the lines to mean “you’re young”/“your story starts here”, but now it has expanded to kind of be a mode of being, or a way of living life….a way of disconnecting from our past. We are all in the midst of creating our “story” and we get to decide where we see ourselves in it because it is all relative.

There are seasons to life and the seasons change according what cards we are “dealt” in life. Another way of saying that is “God’s cycle” like it says in the song. By saying “God’s cycle” I am saying to accept fate, or whatever God faces us with, be it adversity or advantage. That is the part that is not up to us. There is so much that is not up to us…countless variables in life. We are only really in control of a small percentage.

But what can we do with that small percentage? I imagine it like pages and pages are being written of what our life is, faster than we can read, or keep up. What can we do? We can take the reams of white paper with the stories inscribed in them, and stack them to get ourselves always escalating…constantly learning and going up. Growing up. We can resist the escapist idea of “go away” and change it to “grow away” to embrace the hand we’re dealt, and grow from it. Onward and upward." 

-maëry