Lost in Mind
Some songs you write because you're working something out in real time. Others you write because you've carried something a long time, and you're finally far enough past it to look back with clear eyes. "Lost in Mind" is the second kind.
It's about a chapter of my life when the people around me weren't who I thought they were — and I was young enough not to see it yet. When you're in the middle of that, you don't always face it head-on. Sometimes you just drift away from yourself instead. You go along. You stay distracted. You tell yourself it's all just part of the ride.
The song remembers how that ride was sold to me:
They said it won't hurt — just enjoy the ride.
That line took the longest to write, because it's the actual thing people say. That's how it works. It never announces itself as trouble. It always sounds like an invitation. It always sounds like fun. And by the time you understand what it really was, you're already inside it.
The first half of the song lives in that fog.
The mirror cracks but still it stares.
Every version splits in two, and you can't tell which one is really you. Those years didn't feel like living so much as things happening to me, one after another — with a quieter voice underneath it all that I couldn't hear yet.
The bridge is where the song stops pretending to manage it.
Kill the lights, let it cave.
Let it drag me where it takes.
And then, after a few bars of that weight, comes the first fully honest line of the whole song:
Lost but I need to find myself again
Just to climb out of the mess I'm in.
That's the turn. Not triumph. Not arrival. Just the first time the speaker admits out loud that he's lost — and that he wants out. From there, the final chorus starts with the same words as the first, but lands somewhere completely different:
Distance and alcohol were the escape
But it never took me out of this place.
The whole song was building to that line. Running never works, because what you're running from travels with you. The only way out was through.
The closing couplet is the one I most want anyone in that fog to hear:
If I fall, I hit the ground.
Maybe that's where I'm found.
The ground isn't the end of the story. There's a strange kind of mercy in finally landing on something solid. The ground holds. The noise quiets. And whoever you actually are, underneath who you'd been pretending to be — that person is still there, waiting for you to come back.
I put this song third on the album for a reason. After "Drifting Paths" and "Cascade Line" — both songs about traveling through landscapes, internal and external — "Lost in Mind" is the one that finally looks at the cost of the journey. Clearwater Nights is an album about memory, and this is the memory that's hardest to sit with. But it's also the one that taught me the most about who I actually am — which is what the whole album is trying to figure out.
If you've ever realized too late that the people around you weren't on your side, or drifted away from yourself just to get through a season, or finally heard the thing you'd been refusing to hear — this one is for you. I see you. I was there. The ground holds. You're not alone in it.
That's the song.
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