I wrote I Can't Give It Back in the late fall of 2019 after accidentally swallowing a small cactus spine while cleaning up my yard. I imagined the spine slowly embedding itself into my throat, and robbing me of my voice, and I began to wonder if I had the ability to live my life without making music. Needles to say (you can laugh), my anxiety of losing everything was primed and ready for the coming season, as we prepared like mad for our Spring 2020 European tour.

With COVID lockdowns, tour cancellations, and the events of 2020, this embedded fear of loss lit like a match, and I burned pretty hot for a few months. I kept swearing to myself that would ride the wave, make the band more active online, and revolutionize myself into some media savvy self-starter. But community began to recede into abstract networks, personal gave way to political, and the world flattened into one long unreachable horizon. I burned out in late Spring with nothing to show for, and buried myself in my gardening, until the forest fires blocked the sun and everything else died.

I love the hope at the end of I Can't Give It Back - the stanza before the last chorus riffs on some images from the story of Samson from the book of Judges, where he takes honey from the carcass of a lion he'd slain. With help, the following year I was able to find a lot of sweetness at the other side of loss, and I found a whole universe outside of the shrinking world.

Sam