I don’t have the words right now. Not for everything I’m thinking and feeling as I sit with these songs.1
I just have this Andy Squyres concert that popped into my YouTube suggestions like a gift from heaven this morning.
And a deep feeling of being seen in these lyrics and stories.
Growing up, my dad was always one of my best friends. And he was always putting accordion-folded cassette tape liner notes in my hands and wanting me to appreciate the lyrics as much as he did. Sometimes I did. Often I struggled to keep up or find the same resonance that he did.
As a teenager, I read all of Ayn Rand’s works because Atlas Shrugged was my dad’s favorite book.
In the past few years, I’ve recommended two things to him that he’s loved as much as I thought he would—East of Eden and Andy Squyres. And so the way we were when I was a kid has circled back a bit in our shared love of Steinbeck and Squyres.
Oftentimes, when I write here or as I walk through the world, I feel like my dad, looking for someone, anyone who wants to read the same lyrics and talk about them. Someone, anyone who feels the same, who can understand.
I watch my son, unafraid to share what he loves with unselfconscious gusto. Does he consider whether his listener has any interest at all in hearing the list of the Crayola crayon colors in spectrum order? Nope. He just launches in. Why would you not be as enamored as he is?
I have spent my life being just as passionate about the things I love, the ideas I want to talk about, the questions I want to chew on… but I have also always tried to hold them back, feeling like it’s too much for most people, always looking for someone who wants all the thoughts, wants all the words.
Unlike my dad or my son, I care intensely about whether my audience wants to hear what I have to say. I measure myself out with coffee spoons. And I always feel like I’m several spoons too much.
And none of that was what I came here to write, but I’m gonna post this anyway. No edits. Because I know what I desperately need in this next half of life is to live less filtered.
What I came here to say was what I imagined as one line in an Instagram story, just a link to this Andy Squyres concert video and the sentence, “I just need a friend who gets this all the way to their bones like I do.”
But maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t have to have someone who wants to talk about every line of every song like I do.
Maybe I should just talk (or write) whatever I want to about it. No one’s forcing anyone to read this anyway.
I just needed a place this morning to let it burst out how grateful I am for this music, these songs, these words. Unlike almost anything else in my life, I feel like they get me.
They meet me in the same place that Ecclesiastes or the book of Job do. They meet me in the same place that Sara Groves or Jess Ray do but, honestly, I think they meet me even deeper, which feels hard to believe…
Andy Squyres unlocks both the cynic and the optimist who live inside me, at odds.
He gives language to the absurdity and the mystery.
He makes me believe belief is possible.
He makes me want to write and be myself through and through the way he is, the way my dad and son are.
Anyway, I’m halfway through this video, and it’s achingly beautiful and everything I love most in the world. Everything I love most about God, even when I don’t.2
I don’t know if I know anyone else who quite gets that the way it gets me.
To me, there’s no better worship song than an Andy Squyres lyric. His words are the most honest worship I can muster.
Anyone want to sing along?
Honestly, it would probably take a full series of posts, a book that only I want to read, to do that.
which is a line lifted and twisted from Squyres and the kind of thing I think he’d say