Broken Signals
Every album ends. The question is what the last note is allowed to mean.
Broken Signals is the song that closes Clearwater Nights. It's a song about not being able to get through — to anyone, to yourself, to the version of your own life that you're supposed to be living. It opens with words falling through hands. It moves through the quiet room and the chased sleep and the noise drifting away. And then, somewhere on the other side of all of that, it lands on this line:
No more waiting on a sign. I step forward — this life is mine.
That's the last lyric of the album. I put it there on purpose.
The song lives in a real place I've been more than once. The place where nothing connects. Where you can't get through to the people you care about, and they can't get through to you, and the failure of those signals starts to feel like the failure of you. "I could scream, I could yell / Like a broken stream that never tells / Words fall down, they never land / Slip like water through my hands." That's not abstract. That's a specific feeling that has a specific weight. Anyone who's lived inside it knows it.
What I wanted Broken Signals to do — and what closing an album like Clearwater Nights actually required — was to walk through that place honestly without ending up stuck there. To not pretend it's not real. And to not let it have the last word.
The first chorus says the wall is broken and the silence is crawling and the soul feels pushed in. But it also says — and this is the line:
But somewhere in that empty space A spark I still can almost trace. Through the weight, through it all, I still rise when I fall.
That's the seed. That's the small piece of light that the rest of the song works toward.
The second verse retreats further. Lying in a quiet room. Chasing sleep to hide in dark. Letting the noise drift away. "Oregon flows where the silence goes." I live in Oregon. That line is the song's only direct geographic placement, and it matters — because by this point in the album, the silence has somewhere to live. It has a place.
And then something shifts in the second chorus. Same opening line. Same broken wall. But this time the resolution lands different:
But the pound starts to ease. In the stillness I can breathe.
The stillness stops being a prison. It becomes the room you finally sit down in.
The bridge is what the album has been driving toward from the first note of Drifting Paths:
You can't run, you can't hide. Past and future just collide. It all lives on, it all remains. Every loss and every gain.
You can't get rid of any of it. The summers in Florida. The lost years. The streets of lower Manhattan. The changed . The Sheridan that got written off. Every road. Every name. Every soft heart, every broken signal, every dark night, every morning you didn't see coming. It all lives on. It all remains. The work isn't to escape it. The work is to step into the now that all of it has carried you to.
So take the bull and face the day. Stand your ground — don't walk away. Make it yours — don't let it slide. Grip today and bypass time.
That's the lift. That's the decision. And the final chorus follows the decision:
I will create my future bright. Every scar, every bruise — still something left to prove. Love the game, don't turn away. You've got now — that's all today. No more waiting on a sign. I step forward — this life is mine.
I produced the closing of this song with everything opening wide — pedal steel and piano singing together into an unresolved fade. That ending is deliberate. The song doesn't tie itself up. It opens. Because "this life is mine" isn't an arrival. It's a starting line. The choice is made. What comes after the choice is still to be lived.
I put Broken Signals last on the album because Clearwater Nights had to land on a step forward — not a tidy ending. The album has been about looking back at the moments that shaped me. Broken Signals is the one moment that's about now. About what I do with all of it. The closing line isn't a conclusion. It's a vow.
If you've ever sat in the quiet room and tried to chase sleep to hide in dark and felt like every signal you sent was breaking on the way out — Broken Signals is for you. If you're still in that room right now, the song is for you, too. The pound starts to ease. The stillness can hold you. The spark is still in the empty space. And the next step forward is whatever you decide it is.
That's the song. And that's the album.
—